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HP Cloud offering Beta Signup

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34 pointsbrainless18 comments

I don't really understand how you can trust iaas from hp after the board has shown how willing they are to freak out and cancel projects that don't immediately get traction.

If HP were to cancel it for whatever reason, you can go to one of the half-dozen other OpenStack clouds that will be up and running this year. Or you can install it yourself, on your own hardware; it's open source.

Now if Wall Street tires of Amazon's lack of focus...

Is it realized internally or are they using other cloud provider (Amazon, Rackspace etc..) and just rebranding it?

From what I've read and heard from friends who've worked on it at HP, it's internal infrastructure but it's built on top of OpenStack.

We're doing it completely internally, no rebranding. At least for the current, base offering: compute, object storage, images, block storage. (there may be some rebranded or joined services from other companies in the future, CDN part is kind of doing that with Akamai)

http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2012/04/hp-ibm-and-redhat...

apparently it is using openstack, so I guess on there own h/w or maybe Rackspace, but that seems unlikely http://gigaom.com/cloud/hp-ups-its-cloud-bet-on-openstack-an...

So besides the temporary discount, what does this offer that's significantly different from AWS? For example the pricing and naming scheme of HP Cloud Compute and EC2 are more or less identical, and the machine specs are on average the same (one vendor's instance has more RAM, one has more disk, etc.).

Name

Tell an enterprise you want Amazon to host their software then spend a few days/weeks/months explaining that Amazon does more than just selling stuff. HP is well known, and trusted. For your average start-up, no, there's no difference. But for the enterprise having a name you know is very important. It's why people will pay so much for Oracle software over open source with support contracts.

Most enterprise CIO's understand Amazon's place in cloud computing. You'd have to be criminally negligent not to.

Most enterprise tools vendors are positioning for AWS support/compatibility as well. I'm attending a BMC webinar in a few minutes that's squarely focused on AWS.

The point about brand names is more about loyalty, in my experience. Companies that buy Oracle will continue to buy Oracle. Companies that buy HP are more likely to pursue an HP Cloud offering. It's all about established relationships and sales channels.

You could split your service, half hosted on Amazon and the other half on the HP cloud, so next time one of them fails you can still operate..

Or half-hosted on HP, half hosted on Rackspace's OpenStack product (when it is released), so that you don't need to code to two different APIs.

Or half-hosted on IBM, half-hosted on Internap, half-hosted on Dell public cloud, half-hosted in a private cloud... all with the same OpenStack API.

If you decide you want to run your own hardware (as Zynga did & Justin.TV did when EC2 got too expensive), you just install OpenStack on your hardware - it is open source.

This is why Amazon scrambled to partner with Eucalyptus recently, so that they could have something to point to as an alternative that supports the EC2 API.

Actually unless you're doing something very tightly connected to one single service, there's a number of libraries you can use which will give you a nice abstraction.

There was also some reverse-proxy which "normalises" your requests for a given provider presented on Fossdem this year, but I can't recall the name.

Abstraction layers are nice in principle, but the issue isn't really the APIs, it is the different semantics. To give a concrete example, on Rackspace's (current) IaaS offering disks are local to the machine and persistent; on Amazon's offering disks are local and ephemeral, or locked to one AZ and persistent.

The API issue is a triviality compared to hiding those details. I think that's the real power of OpenStack - the shared API is a convenience, but the shared model is priceless.

Have they disclosed what the block storage service is backed by? LeftHand P4000s?

They are using OpenStack so OpenStack Swift (same software powering Rackspace Cloud Files)

Block storage is like a SAN or Amazon's EBS; Object Storage is like a NAS or Amazon's S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files (Swift).

So they're not using Swift for block storage, unless they've built some clever stuff on top.

OpenStack does include a volume service for block storage, but it can use a number of back-ends.

No, actually it's not an opensource/public product providing the block storage.

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