Hewlett-Packard is gearing up to launch the first two offerings in its Cloud Services portfolio, and the company is dangling an aggressive service-level agreement to attract customers.
HP's Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network services, currently in public beta, will be generally available Aug. 1, said Gavin Pratt, senior product manager on HP's Cloud Services team, in a Wednesday blog post.
Cloud Object Storage handles archiving and backup, storage of large data sets, and the serving of static content for Web apps. Cloud CDN, powered by Akamai, uses cached and distributed servers to improve performance of Cloud Object Storage.
Cloud Object Storage was one of the two services HP unveiled last September when it debuted its Cloud Services portfolio. The other, HP Cloud Compute, lets customers purchase compute instances on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it is still in public beta.
[Related: HP Launches Private Beta Of Cloud Compute, Storage Services]
HP continuously monitors its cloud services for downtime, and if it does not meet its SLA terms for Cloud Object Storage or Cloud CDN, HP will offer a service credit to customers, according to Pratt.
"If for some reason you don’t receive 100 percent availability, let us know how you were affected, and we will credit your bill for the affected service up to 30 percent depending upon the degree of unavailability," Pratt said in the blog post.
The 30 percent credit kicks in for customers who experience less than 99 percent of downtime, according to HP's terms. The credit drops to 20 percent for uptime of between 99 and 99.5 percent, 10 percent for uptime between 99.5 and 99.9 percent and 5 percent for uptime between 99.95 and 99.99 percent.
HP is offering a 50 percent discount on Cloud Object Storage, Cloud CDN and Cloud Object Storage bandwidth until Aug. 1. HP will continue offering a 50 percent price cut on Cloud Compute during its beta period.
HP is also offering a free trial of its Cloud Services portfolio, which includes up to 1,000 unit-hours/month of on-demand compute, or up to 300+ GB/month of storage capacity, or up to 250 GB/month of CDN bandwidth. Customers can also use any combination of these services for free for up to $20 in service charges.
PUBLISHED JULY 18, 2012
