HP Lines Up Partners for Its Public Cloud Service

As promised, Hewlett-Packard today released an open beta of its public cloud service and disclosed more than three dozen partners that are supporting it.

The company's HP Cloud Services, as reported, is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering targeted at enterprises, developers and ISVs looking for an off-premises alternative for compute and storage capacity. Available for testing immediately is HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage (announced earlier this week) and the HP Content Delivery Network, all of which will be made available on a usage basis.

HP's public cloud services clearly aim to compete against the IaaS portfolio offered by industry leader Amazon Web Services. The HP public cloud offerings are based on the open source platform OpenStack, designed to allow interoperability among public cloud providers that support the platform, such as Rackspace, and compatible private cloud infrastructure.

The 37 vendors that announced support for HP Cloud Services include application vendors Otopy, PXL and SendGrid; database suppliers CloudOpt, EnerpriseDB and Xeround; development and testing companies SOASTA and Spirent; management vendors BitNami, CloudSoft, enStratus, Kaavo, RightScale, ScaleXtreme, Smartscale Systems and Standing Cloud; mobile providers FeedHendy and Kinvey; New Relic, which offers a monitoring solution; PaaS platform providers ActiveState, CloudBees, Corent Technology, CumuLogic, Engine Yard and GigaSpaces; security vendors Dome9 and SecludIT; and storage suppliers CloudBerry Lab, Gladinet, Panzura, Riverbed Technology, SME Storage, StorSimple, TwinStrata and Zmanda.

Rounding off the list is infrastructure management vendor Opscode and billing provider Zuora. For its part Opscode, which supplies the popular Chef cloud infrastructure management portfolio, said it's offering complete integration with HP Cloud Services to provide infrastructure automation via its Open Source Chef, Hosted Chef and Private Chef solutions. Using Opscode's plug-in for HP Cloud services, Opscode said customers can build and manage HP Cloud Compute instances.

Riverbed said its Whitewater cloud storage gateways will work with HP Cloud Object Storage, aimed at those who want to provide disaster recovery alternatives to traditional tape-based backup. And RightScale is adding HP Cloud Services to the portfolio of services and cloud infrastructure its solution can manage. With HP's new cloud service, RightScale now manages six public cloud providers and three private IaaS platforms, including OpenStack, Citrix CloudStack and the Amazon-compatible Eucalyptus.

Another management supplier, Standing Cloud, said HP Cloud Services is another alternative for hosting its marketplace for developers, IT pros and ISVs. The Standing Cloud Marketplace provides on-demand application hosting, installation and management. With security vendors such as Dome9 announcing support for HP Cloud Services, customers will have options for ensuring protection, a key concern among enterprise customers. The Dome9 cloud security service will integrate with HP Cloud Services, via an API key that enables the cloud server security and policy-based automation.

There are many other examples but the point is HP is trying to come out of the gate showing that it has lined up a broad partner ecosystem. Do you think HP is going to give Amazon a run for its money? Leave a comment below or drop me a line at [email protected].

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 10, 2012