HP Extends Commitment to OpenStack

Hewlett-Packard Development company, L.P. extended its commitment to the OpenStack community with new and enhanced Converged Cloud offerings that enable enterprises to increase agility, speed innovation and lower costs.

In advancing open, standards-based cloud solutions, HP is integrating OpenStack technology to deliver enterprise-grade solutions across its private, public and hybrid cloud portfolio.

Over the past two years, HP has been a contributor to the advancement of the OpenStack project in infrastructure operations, software and developer tools. (Bitergia, OpenStack Grizzly Analysis, April 4, 2013)

HP’s contributions have focused on continuous integration and quality assurance, which has supported the development of a reliable and scalable cloud platform that is equipped to handle mission-critical production workloads.

"Enterprises are embracing open-source cloud solutions to increase workload portability and avoid vendor lock-in," said Saar Gillai, SVP and GM, converged cloud, HP. "HP provides the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid cloud solution leveraging OpenStack across private and public cloud environments."

New and enhanced offerings
HP CloudSystem, the company’s private cloud solution, now features integrated OpenStack technology with the latest release, CloudSystem 7.2. By combining the flexibility of open-source software with proven, enterprise-focused functionality for provisioning, managing and scaling clouds, CloudSystem leverages OpenStack technology to enable support of ‘bursting’ capabilities and KVM resource pools. This allows enterprises to tap external resources directly from CloudSystem for pay-as-you-go capacity.

Additionally, HP introduced two new CloudSystem Bursting Activation Services that allow enterprises and service providers to reliably and quickly install and configure cloud-bursting capabilities. HP experts can help clients configure the CloudSystem software needed to burst from one CloudSystem to another, providing access to additional capacity across multiple CloudSystems and enabling service providers to deliver on-demand capacity to customers. HP also can educate IT staff on operating and managing the CloudSystem technology to simplify the start-up of hybrid clouds and accelerate efficient resource use.

HP also expanded its public cloud portfolio with new Cloud Messaging, available as a service to enable developers to build more fault-tolerant applications and reduce application downtime by duplicating messages on multiple servers. Using the emerging OpenStack Marconi API standard, Cloud Messaging serves as an intermediary for trading information between applications by offering language and framework independence without any system installation or configuration.

To support the need that many larger organizations and service providers have for enterprise storage, HP submitted to the OpenStack foundation a blueprint and software for orchestration and provisioning of FC storage in private and hybrid cloud deployments. In line with this contribution, the Converged Storage portfolio‚ including HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and StoreVirtual Storage‚ now supports OpenStack technology across both iSCSI and FC protocols, providing the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of a cloud-based open-source platform to customers with mission-critical environments and high resiliency requirements.

Availability

• CloudSystem 7.2 is available worldwide.
• CloudSystem Bursting Activation Services will be available worldwide this summer direct from HP Technology Services and authorized channel partners. Pricing varies according to location and implementation.
• Cloud Messaging is available in private beta.
• The OpenStack drivers for 3PAR StoreServ and StoreVirtual Storage are available in the next version of the OpenStack platform, Grizzly, which was released by the OpenStack community this month.