HP introduces private cloud beta

Amazon Web Services has a new competitor. HP has announced its long-rumoured public cloud services offering, launching betas of Cloud Compute for deployment of compute instances and Cloud Object Storage.

The company said that the new offerings will be available for public, private and hybrid cloud platforms and that the beta would be available for a limited number of users.

According to HP, Cloud Compute allows users to deploy compute instances on-demand, customising them to handle customers' unique workloads and proving the ability to scale.

HP Cloud Object Storage has been designed for archiving and backing up data, serving static content for web applications, and storing large public or private data sets, such as online files and media.

In a blog post, HP VP Emil Sayegh said that the software was based on the “integration of OpenStack through our easy to use, web-based User Interface (UI) along with open, RESTful APIs.”  HP is relatively new to open cloud computing - the company joined Open Stack only last month - and it's not clear what is meant by integration between private and public cloud means and HP is dead-batting queries on that one.

The company is going to have a tough fight to make inroads into a market that AWS appears to have sown up.

According to Ian Brooks, European head of innovation and sustainable computing for HP, the key selling point is going to be HP's experience as an IT provider that's going to count. “ HP is a recognised provider of IT, delivering the most complete portfolio of services for the entire range of application workloads. It is our belief that through close collaboration with the developer community and capitalising on the strength of HP's portfolio, we can deliver seamless and secure experiences for customers,” he said.

The private beta is open for participants at the HP cloud website, albeit with a limited number of spaces, but the company is being cagey as to when the complete cloud offering will be launched. “The private beta is the first in a series of announcements on our cloud services capabilities. We will have more to share in the coming months,” said Brooks. Watch this space in other words.