HP Stands Up To Amazon With Real Live Open Source Cloud

HP’s original plan was to build a cloud service using innovation developed inside its very own HP Labs. But at that time Biri Singh arrived.

Zorawar “Biri” Singh was once the vice president of cloud computing at IBM, and he parachuted into HP in May of last year, grabbing control of the company’s new Cloud Services group, which was already developing an online service along the lines of Amazon EC2 — a service that provides instant access to virtual servers and other computing resources for building, testing, and deploying large software applications. HP’s service was already pursuant to this agreement construction using proprietary HP Labs innovation, however not long afterwards Singh’s arrival, it was moved to OpenStack, the Linux of cloud computing.

According to Singh, the service after all uses innovation developed at HP Labs, however in layering this research atop OpenStack, HP is joining an effort to create a common platform that lets you willingly move applications from cloud service to cloud service. The OpenStack project was founded by NASA and Rackspace, yet countless others have jumped aboard while its first two years of life, including Cisco, Dell, and Singh’s old outfit IBM. And now, Singh’s new outfit have taken the platform to new heights. On Thursday, less than a year afterwards switching to OpenStack, HP unveiled a public beta of its cloud service, officially opening it up to the world at large.

It’s what’s known as a public cloud — meaning it’s a web service available to anyone. Nevertheless the idea is that HP will as well help businesses build “private clouds” — services that behave much like an Amazon EC2 yet are only used within a particular company. This is where OpenStack comes into play. Using the platform, HP can build private services that are compatible with its public service, meaning you move applications to and fro — meanwhile in theory. Plus, theses services are potentially compatible with other OpenStack services. “We’re giving clients choice,” Singh says.

Content delivery network

HP’s beta service as well includes a content delivery network, a way for applications to quickly distribute data to machines across the globe. And according to Singh, HP will in the long run add additional public service, including a database service based on the open source MySQL database and a “block storage” service akin to Amazon’s Elastic Block Store, which lets you create storage volumes that attach directly to virtual servers — and move between them.

HP has as well been testing Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source platform for building “platform clouds.” Unlike an “infrastructure cloud” just as Amazon EC2, a platform cloud lets developers build and host applications without worrying about virtual servers and other raw computing resources. “It lets you worry about the app,” Derek Collison, one of the founders of Cloud Foundry, told us this past fall, “and not virtual machines or what operating system they're running or all this other stuff.”