HP Joins The Hybrid Cloud Race

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HP, who was a reluctant player in the cloud game for a long time, today announced some products and services aimed at enterprises who are looking forward to move to hybrid clouds this year. They are trying to position themselves as a cloud provider who can keep enterprises secure. Leaving aside all the marketing talk from today’s announcement, it is an interesting move by HP but they have a long battle ahead with other players like IBM and Dell in the enterprise market where these competitors have moved ahead in the game.

HP’s new HP Hybrid Delivery Solutions is aimed at the enterprises who want to tap into third party hosted clouds that can be provisioned instantly for certain workloads while keeping control over the rest inside their firewall. I used the term “third party hosted clouds” because HP’s offering is not public clouds in the traditional sense. Clearly, they are targeting a niche group of users who would want instant provisioning and pay per use model but not ready to take the public cloud route.

Their offering, called HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute, delivers raw compute power as a service to enterprises from two of the HP’s datacenters. HP securely hosts enterprise workloads, and can be accessed through the Internet, a virtual private network, or a dedicated circuit. This service is governed by specified policies for service, performance, security and privacy, it provides clients with rapidly deployed, secure computing with scalable IT capacity. In short, HP is trying to offer enterprise customers a hosted private cloud offering which can be provisioned instantly based on needs and paid using a certain type of metered pricing (based on MIPS, million instructions per second). Windows, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and RedHat Enterprise Linux servers are available in small, medium, and large sizes. With HP CloudSystem Management software, HP Cloud Service Automation and the associated consulting services, they can offer an integrated set of solutions for their enterprise customers.

This is a long overdue move to keep HP relevant in the increasingly cloud based enterprise market. Whether this unique approach of HP to reposition their offering for a cloudy world, without moving away too much from their comfort zone will work or not, is too difficult to predict now. There are many enterprise IT managers who would love an offering like this compared to, say, Amazon Web Services. Whether this is sustainable in the long run is something we need to wait and see.