HP expands cloud services beta

IDG News Service - Preparing for its entry into the market for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), Hewlett-Packard on Thursday launched a second beta program of cloud computing services it plans to offer commercially.

The company's HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network services can now all be accessed by the public. All the services will be offered on an hourly pay-as-you-go model.

This beta program expands upon a smaller, free beta portfolio of cloud services offered by the company last September.

The company will be marketing these services for organizations that want to run large-scale Web services from the cloud. HP Cloud Compute offers virtual servers. HP Cloud Object Storage offers object-based storage, and the HP Cloud Content Delivery Network provides a globally distributed caching layer to speed the delivery of services.

For these services, HP has assembled an impressive roster of over 40 partners to offer individual technology components and complementary offerings. For instance, EnterpriseDB provides a version of the PostGres open source database. CloudBees provides a platform for running Java applications. Engine Yard provides a similar platform for Ruby on Rails and PHP. Spirent provides development tools and RightScale, ScaleXtreme and Smartscale Systems provide management tools.

The company also offers services for block-based storage and for hosting data on MySQL deployments, though those remain closed as private betas.

The company did not reveal when all these services would be available commercially.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com