Report: HP To Deploy IaaS Public Cloud Within Two Months

According to a New York Times blog post, Hewlett-Packard is getting ready to deploy an Infrastructure as a Service public cloud that parallels Amazon Web Services within the next two months. The platform will differentiate itself from Amazon Web Services by providing a suite of services and business-oriented products that cater to the needs of enterprises. Speaking of the platform, Zorawar “Biri” Singh noted, “We’re not just building a cloud for infrastructure. Amazon has the lead there. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services.” The platform will feature structured and unstructured databases that cater to the Big Data needs of enterprises. The HP public cloud will also contain tools that streamline the use of Ruby, Java and PHP, in addition to software that allows customers to automate provisioning and workflow. Moreover, HP will deploy the platform alongside an online store that offers HP-approved products to users of the cloud platform. The launch of the platform promises to serve up even more competition for Amazon Web Services, which already stands to encounter a significant threat to its market share lead from commercial OpenStack deployments. Just this week, Network World reported that Sony had migrated some of its products away from Amazon Web Services to OpenStack, though the reports have yet to be confirmed. What appears to be true is that Sony is using OpenStack alongside Amazon Web Services, though the extent of its use of OpenStack for production-ready deployments remains unclear.