Hewlett Packard has announced just recently that over the next 2 years they intend to make an investment of Billion in cloud computing products and services.
OpenStack is a cloud computing project that HP co-founded and is an open source and free platform for both private and public services.
Cloud services are becoming increasingly popular both with large and small organisations as well as budget constrained tech start-up companies. Many organisations rely on hardware owned and operated by 3rd parties.
Martin Fink (HP executive vice president and chief technology officer) recently said “Customer challenges today extend beyond cloud. They include how to manage, control and scale applications in a hybrid environment that spans multiple technology approaches”.
HP has signed up Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology to construct server hardware for cloud computer service providers.
HP have committed to making available in 20 of its 80 data centres worldwide its OpenStack cloud based public services over the next 18 months. HP has been involved with OpenStack for a while now but this announcement shows that the company has decided to truly invest in this technology. Previous HP OpenStack offerings included a high element of proprietary technology and was tied to HP hardware, and operated out of only 2 of the 80 worldwide data centres, but this new offering will be termed the Helion HP OpenStack Distribution and will run on any hardware and be truly open source.
OpenStack isn’t as yet widely in use although some big companies like PayPal, Bestbuy, Comcast and Bloomburg have deployed it.
