Roundup: HP Converged Cloud Takes on Amazon

HP said today that its public cloud services will open to the public on May 10, competing directly with Amazon Web Services and other public cloud service providers. The service has been in a private beta since it was announced in January 2011. The announcement was part of the unveiling of HP Converged Cloud, a broad initiative to position HP's offerings for the cloud. Here's a look at notable analysis and commentary from around the web:

ZDNet - Dana Gardner looks at how HP is positioning the service: "HP’s public cloud is geared more as a cloud provider support service set, rather than a componentized infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) depot for end-user engineers, start-ups and shadow IT groups. HP Cloud Services seems designed more to appeal to mainstream IT and developers in ISVs, service providers and enterprises, a different group than early public cloud entrant and leader Amazon Web Services has attracted."

InfoWorld - David Linthicum provides his take on HP vs. Amazon: "HP's cloud vision is different than Amazon's. Where Amazon sees the public cloud as the endgame, HP sees cloud deployments moving from private to public to hybrid. HP'ss focus is on cross-compatibility and on development and deployment of software that can leverage public clouds, including the company's own. From where I sit, this is exactly what HP should do -- in fact, it's HP's only option. If HP tries to battle it out with AWS in the public cloud space, it will quickly be handed its head. That's why it needs to focus on what AWS is not focusing on: the transformation of internal systems to private and hybrid clouds, with the vision of eventually moving to public clouds."

The Register - "What's new today is that HP has a block storage service and a database service that it has developed in-house to add to OpenStack. Ryan says that HP has come up with its own Cloud Block Storage analog to Amazon's Elastic Block Storage service that will complement the Swift service. HP is in the process of trying to figure out if and when to open source the code behind this Cloud Block Storage, but generally speaking, Ryan expects for HP to open source the code it uses on its cloud."

GigaOm - Barb Darrow on the role of OpenStack: "Big IT companies like HP hope to use OpenStack to combat Amazon Web Services’ huge presence in the public cloud arena and to blunt VMware’s push to entrench its proprietary virtualization tool set — which already dominates in corporate data centers — as the de facto standard in cloud computing."

ZDNet - Larry Dignan writes that "HP could be construed as late. HP has been talking converged infrastructure and provides gear to cloud providers. However, hardware vendors are also going to be service providers. HP’s public cloud comes as Amazon Web Services has been in the market for years. IBM has also leveraged its hosting business into the cloud. Ditto for Rackspace and a bevy of others. HP has the installed base to play catch-up, but you wonder why this wasn’t done earlier."

TalkinCloud - Joe Panettieri looks at the database component: "How’s this for ironic: The new HP Public Cloud will promote MySQL databases as a service, essentially leveraging Oracle’s software to compete with the Microsoft SQL Azure cloud, among other public cloud database services. HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) have been locked in a nasty feud ever since Oracle hired former HP CEO Mark Hurd as president."