Parts of HP's Public Cloud Hit General Availability

After talking up its plans to offer a public cloud service for well over a year, Hewlett-Packard has made the first two components of its HP Cloud generally available.

As of Aug. 1, customers can purchase the HP's Cloud Object Storage and CDN. The company is backing the service with a 99.95 percent service level agreement. If the service can't meet that SLA, HP will offer customers credits.

Compute services and subscriptions to HP's cloud-based MySQL remain in beta and while it is not generally available or backed by an SLA, customers can use them for production workloads, said Marc Padovani, director of product management for HP Cloud Services.

"We are still going though updates and hardening of the service," Padovani said. "Sometime later this year it will be at a point where it meets our levels of quality, availability and durability and we will apply the SLA and bring it to general availability status." Any customer can sign up for the compute services beta but the MySQL testing is somewhat more restrictive, Padovani said. HP will contact customers who sign up for the MySQL service beta and help set them up, he said.

As reported back in May, the HP Cloud Block Storage Service lets customers add storage volumes up to 2TB per volume. In addition to supporting multiple volumes atop of HP Cloud Compute instances, customers can create snapshots of their volumes to create point-in-time copies, allowing them to create new volumes from the snapshots, which can be backed up to HP Object Storage for added redundancy if needed.

The storage service is based on the OpenStack Swift storage system, a move that will ease portability of data to other OpenStack cloud services. For the content delivery network service, HP has created an interface to Akamai's CDN. Padovani said HP intends to contribute the code used to develop the CDN interface layer to the Swift object storage service to the OpenStack group. According to Padovani, "it eliminates the need for someone to have to go through all the integration work we did with Akamai."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 08, 2012 at 11:59 AM