I attended a seminar today given by HP on their latest proposition for the cloud market.
They suggested the cloud market is divided into three sectors; software as a service (SAAS), Private Cloud and infrastructure as a service (IAAS).
Examples included salesforce.com (SAAS), and amazon web services (IAAS).
My overall impression of their presentation seemed to be “Private Cloud” is the way to go and HP have this lovely BladeSystem (renamed CloudSystem) which will be perfect for an in house virtualisation environment and comes bundled with software provisioning tools (Matrix), all available to purchase with a single part number.
With regard to SAAS, they didn’t seem to have much to offer.
As for IAAS, they seem to be pushing their very high end blade servers the VS1 (750 x virtual machines) to the VS3 (6,000 x virtual machines). These products are clearly not aimed for the small and medium sized enterprise and are only suitable for large service providers who want to use HP technology to offer a cloud based service to their customer base.
The newest development was a “burst” capability whereby if you’re in house BladeSystem, sorry, CloudSystem, runs out of resources, you can automatically call on external cloud based resources from savvis.com ,the cloud service provider. Only thing is, that’s not actually available until November. Also, it begs the question if you need an overflow or “burst” capability, cloud based service from Savvis why wouldn’t you go directly to them rather than access them via a contract with HP? I wonder if Savvis use HP blade servers and provisioning toolsJ
I can see their blade servers and provisioning tools being attractive to large service providers wanting to wrap it up with a service level agreement and maybe an on line application, but they really are pushing it a bit to portray their entry level BladeServers / Matrix tools as some kind of cloud based offering.
