At HP Discover 2011 in Vienna, HP announced new cloud solutions that advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds, enabling enterprises, service providers and governments to capitalize on emerging market opportunities.
Fundamentally, the solutions are aimed at helping IT organizations move from a technology-centric view to a service-centric view, and how they can deliver the right services to the right customers with the right parameters, costs, flexibility, and service levels at the right time, Frances Guida, manager of HP Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking, tells 5 Minute Briefing. In order to do that, businesses will want to delivery some services internally from their internal IT organization, while it will be best to others in from outside "and we call that a hybrid delivery model," says Guida.
All of these product announcements focus on furthering enterprises' ability to take advantage of the hybrid delivery model or service providers' ability to offer services for that kind of model, Guida notes. The new offerings are important, says Guida, because over the past year, customers have moved from trying to figure out if cloud is something they should pay attention to, to starting pilot work and doing first cloud projects, and are now moving beyond simply trying to learn about it to realizing that the best way to learn about it is to do it and get started.
According to HP, the HP Cloud Solutions, based on HP Converged Infrastructure, provide the hardware, software, services and programs that enable service providers, enterprises and governments to rapidly and securely deliver IT as a service. HP's new offerings address the key areas of client needs - building differentiated cloud offerings, consuming cloud services from the public domain, and managing, governing and securing the entire environment.
The new cloud solutions include:
New HP CloudSystem integrations with Alcatel-Lucent to enable communications services providers to enable communications services providers automate the provisioning and management of cloud resources through a highly reliable network.
HP has also introduced the newest release of its CloudSystem Matrix, the core operating environment that powers HP CloudSyste. The new release has key new capabilities. First, it enables clients to build hybrid clouds directly from the Matrix console with push-button access to externally sourced cloud-based IT resources with out-of-the-box cloudbursting capability. CloudSystem Matrix 7.0 also includes on-demand provisioning of HP 3PAR storage to reduce errors and speed deployment of new services to just minutes. Matrix has always been able to tap resources that were preprovisioned and now that capability is being extended now so that storage does not have to be preprovisioned.
In addition, there is a new HP Cloud Protection Program that spans people, process, policies and technologies to deliver a comparable level of security for a hybrid cloud as a private internet-enabled IT environment would receive. The new program includes comprehensive strategy, roadmap, design and implementation services built on a common reference architecture. The program is supported by a Cloud Protection Center of Excellence that enables clients to test HP solutions as well as partner and third-party products that support cloud and virtualization protection.
There are also new and enhanced HP services that provide a cloud infrastructure as a service including HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute which automates distribution of application workloads across multiple servers to improve application performance and the HP Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP Development and Sandbox Solution which enables clients to evaluate and prototype functionality of SAP Enterprise Resource Planning software via a virtual private cloud, using a flexible, consumption-based model.
And, says Guida, because cloud is not just a technology - it is not just a "what" but a "how" - customers need different kinds of skills sets than they may have already in order to take advantage of cloud technologies in the future.
New HP services that address this need include, says Rebekah Harvey, director of product management for HP's Certification and Learning Team, include three HP ExpertONE certifications - HP ASE Cloud Architect, HP ASE Cloud Integrator and HP ASE Master Cloud Integrator - which are cloud certifications that include business and technical content. "The three new certifications focus on the architecting and integration skills required for a successful cloud implementation," Harvey explains.
The expanded HP ExpertONE program includes five independent commercial training organizations that deliver HP learning solutions anywhere in the world.
For more information about the new and enhanced offerings, visit the HP website at http://www.hp.com.