Hewlett Packard has released its first public beta cloud services with over 40 companies publicly supporting the move.
The company announced that its three services – HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network – were to be made available through a pay-as-you-go system after the free beta ended last week.
HP stated that their goal was to “enable developers, independent software vendors and enterprises of all sizes to build the next generation of web applications.”
Among those rousingly proclaiming their support were storage companies StorSimple and TwinStrata, and cloud testers SOASTA and Spirent, with companies ranging from database and management to Platform as a System (PaaS) providers on board.
SOASTA roared that the partnership will “add…thousands of additional servers to our global test environment to further ensure optimal performance testing for our customers”, whilst Spirent beamed that “being able to test from within HP Cloud Services is an extremely effective and necessary way for IT managers to…take full advantage of cloud computing and HP Cloud Services.”
Alongside the ‘ecosystem’ of partners, HP also promised that their open-source technology, built on OpenStack, will be more productive for developers, will give faster time to code, and ensures no vendor lock-in.
It’s safe to say that HP will have to hit the ground running if it wants to seriously compete with Amazon. Amazon’s end of year figures for 2011 revealed a staggering 762 billion objects on the cloud and over 500,000 requests per second logged on their servers.
HP senior vice president and general manager Zorawar “Biri” Singh said of the release: “We will continue to build, integrate and deploy developer-focused features, designed to support a world-class cloud that enables our customers and partners to run and operate web services at scale, on a global basis.”
Singh had intimated this development as far back as March when he told the New York Times: “We’re not just building a cloud for infrastructure. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services.”
