HP Launches Cloud Platform, Data Center Tools

HP today announced Data Center Transformation portfolio, a suite of services to help companies modernize and consolidate their existing data centers, or shift their operations to a cloud-based service hosted by HP.

The most intriguing new piece of HP's strategy is the company's entrance into cloud computing with HP Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS), which lets customers host applications in HP data centers optimized for Microsoft Exchange, SAP applications and other critical business apps. The HP platform joins a growing number of software as a service (SaaS) offerings, most notably Amazon's utility hosting services and Salesforce.com.

"Within a matter of hours, customers can rapidly access additional computing power to meet their fluctuating needs," HP said in its announcement. "With HP AIaaS, customers can realize improved service levels and convert traditional capital investment into an ongoing operating expense because all assets are owned and managed by HP."

HP also announced service offerings targeting facilities service, data center consolidation and virtualization, and new software tools to manage virtualized infrastructure. The offerings include HP Operations Orchestration, which automates management of physical and virtualized infrastructure, which is also a focus of Cisco's Data Center 3.0 services.

HP Data Center Transformation pulls together several acquisitions in the data center sector, including its $1.6 billion deal for Opsware in July 2007 and purchase of EYP Mission Critical Facilities in November. Opsware's automation software is supporting the new orchestration offerings, while EYP will back the facilities services.

Larry Dignan has additional details of HP's infrastructure as a service offering. The platform will run in HP data centers in Atlanta and Paris, and will include a compute services similar to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). More from Larry's article:

Pat Adamiak, vice president of portfolio, marketing and alliances at HP Services told ZDNet it was "hard to quote a simple price, but it's competitive with external offerings."