HP’s cloud portfolio consists of a range of cloud-based solutions and services. The HP Public Cloud is a true infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering and the current core product, which is marketed generous. The HP Enterprise Services – Virtual Private Cloud provides a hosted Private Cloud from HP. The Public Cloud services are delivered exclusively from the US with data centers in the west and east. Even if HPs sales force is distributed around the world English is the only supported language.

Portfolio

The IaaS core offering includes compute power (HP Cloud Compute), storage (HP Cloud Storage) and network capacity. Furthermore, the value-added services HP Cloud Load Balancer, HP Cloud Relational DB, HP Cloud DNS, HP Cloud Messaging, HP Cloud CDN, HP Cloud Object Storage, HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Monitoring are available with which a virtual infrastructure for own applications and services can be build.

The HP Cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack and is multi-tenant. The virtual machines are virtualized with KVM and can be booked in fixed sizes (Extra Small to Double Extra Large) per hour. The local storage of a virtual machine is not persistent. Long-term data can be stored and connected on an independent block storage. Own virtual machine images cannot be uploaded to the cloud. The load balancer is currently still in a private beta. The infrastructure is a multi-fault domain, which is considered by the service level agreement. A multi-factor authorization is currently not offered.

The HP Enterprise Cloud Services offer a variety of solutions geared to business. Including recovery-as-a-service, Dedicated Private Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud. The application services include solutions for collaboration, messaging, mobility and unified communications. Specific business applications include HP Enterprise Cloud Services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, HP Enterprise Cloud Services for Oracle and HP Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP. Professional services complement the Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio. The Enterprise Cloud Services – Virtual Private Cloud is a multi-tenant and by HP hosted Private Cloud and is aimed at SAP, Oracle and other enterprise applications.

Analysis

HP has a lot of experience in building and operating IT infrastructures and achieve the same objectives in the areas of Public and Private Cloud infrastructures. For this HP depends on own hardware components and an extensive partner network. HP has a global sales force and an equally high marketing budget and is therefore able to reach a variety of customers. Even if the data center for the Public Cloud are exclusively in the US.

In recent years HP has invested much effort and development. Nevertheless, the HP Public Cloud compute service is only available to the general public since December 2012. Due to this, HP has no significant track record for its Public Cloud. There is only a limited interoperability between the HP Public Cloud based on OpenStack, and the Private Cloud (HP CloudSystem, HP Converged Cloud) based on HP Cloud OS. Since the HP Public Cloud does not have the ability to upload own virtual machine images on the basis of a self-service, customers currently cannot transfer workloads from the Private Cloud to the Public Cloud. Even if the Private Cloud is based on OpenStack.

INSIGHTS Report

The INSIGHTS Report “HP Cloud Portfolio – Overview & Analysis” can be downloaded for free as a PDF.