Hewlett Packard on Wednesday opened the door on a private beta that gives developers early access to Cloud Compute and Cloud Object Storage, the first two offerings in HP's Cloud Services program.
HP's Cloud Compute will enable customers to purchase compute instances on a pay-as-you-go basis, and customize the distribution of these resources to fit specific workloads and rapidly scale when needed, Emil Sayegh, HP's Cloud Services vice president, said in a Wednesday blog post.
HP's Cloud Object Storage, as the name suggests, is designed for cloud based archiving and backup, storage of large data sets, and for serving static content for Web apps, Sayegh said in the blog post.
"We already collected some great feedback during our first development stage, which strongly influenced our private beta offerings," Sayegh said in the blog post. "Now we would like to hear from more of you and get your input on features, functionality and the overall experience, in order to ensure that we continue to create an offering that matches your needs."
HP's Cloud Compute and Cloud Object Storage are built on HP Converged Infrastructure and software and include integration with OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project that HP joined in July. Sayegh said HP developers are already actively working with OpenStack and the company plans to offer more insight into its plans for the project in October at the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference, which HP is sponsoring.
HP's view is that teaming with OpenStack and its approximately 90 participating members, which include Cisco, Citrix and Dell, will give HP customers more opportunities to get on board with cloud computing.
"HP is taking an active role in the OpenStack community and we see this as an opportunity to enable customers, partners and developers with unique infrastructure and development solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud environments," Sayegh said in a July blog post.
HP Cloud Services is currently being incubated by HP's Office of Strategy and Technology division (OS&T), which is led by Shane Robison, executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer.
HP, which discontinued development of WebOS hardware last month, has reportedly moved its WebOS software engineering, developer relations and software product marketing into OS&T, although the company has yet to officially confirm this.
