Both HP and Dell are entering the IaaS cloud services business, building their infrastructure on their own servers and OpenStack (HP)/vCloud (Dell). Dell promises to come with two more clouds based on Windows Azure and OpenStack.
HP announced their support of the OpenStack platform in July of this year, joining some 100 other companies – including Citrix, Dell, RightScale, AMD, Intel, and Rackspace-, who enlisted their support a year ago when the initiative was launched. They promise to have 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,“ and some HP developers are already participating on OpenStack’s Launchpad and IRC channel.
Although HP joined OpenStack only a month or so ago, they have been working on their OpenStack-based cloud offering much earlier than July, announcing HP Cloud Services including Cloud Compute and Cloud Object Storage on September 7th. They already have had Enterprise Cloud Services, a service providing compute, storage and network resources to US government and enterprises, and HP CloudSystem, a management platform for public, private and hybrid clouds, but the new HP Cloud Services announced at HP Summit 2011 on March 14, provide compute and storage on a pay-as-you-go basis, which is the de facto way of billing cloud services.
HP Cloud Services are currently in beta and available to registering customers who will be able to use limited computing, up to 10 instances, and storage resources for free, but they are warned not to use them for production purposes. There is no information on when these cloud services enter into production. The data centers supporting these services are built using HP’s servers.
Just a few days earlier, Dell and VMware jointly announced a partnership for creating Dell’s first Cloud based on Dell PowerEdge C-Series servers, used in other data centers including Windows Azure, and VMware vCloud Datacenter Services providing the infrastructure needed for public, private and hybrid clouds and the availability of consulting, application and infrastructure services. Dell intends to build private and hybrid clouds in their own or the customer’s datacenter using VMware vSphere and vCloud Director.
Mark Bilger, VP and CTO of Dell Services, added that their cloud solutions won’t be limited to VMware’s vCloud, but they will roll out new solutions based on Windows Azure and OpenStack in the following months, which is in line with previous remarks made by Carter George, Director of Storage Strategy at Dell, saying that the company will offer both IaaS and PaaS services.
Dell Cloud is currently available only to a small number of selected beta customers, but they will accept more beta testers this month followed by a public offering later this year, and the service will enter production some time in 2012.