Tag: helion

HP gets off of its public cloud

Posted on October 23, 2015 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThe maker of expensive printer ink, HP is calling it quits on its public cloud offering.

The Helion Public Cloud will be abandoned next year as the vendor is more interested in private cloud products and rather scared of its chums Microsoft and Amazon.

HP has been denying that it will close Helion for six months, but the signs were there. In April, HP executive Bill Hilf said that HP no longer saw public cloud as a priority and that it made “no sense” for HP to go head to head with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

He backtracked on this statement and said that HP would continue running Helion which operates  one of the largest OpenStack-based public clouds. Writing in his bog, Hilf confirmed what he denied six months ago and that Helion Public Cloud is doomed.

Hilf said HP has made the decision to “double down on our private and managed cloud capabilities” and confirmed that HP will “sunset” Helion Public Cloud on 31 January 2016.

Public cloud remains relevant to HP as part of its hybrid cloud strategy, but the vendor will now work with multiple partners such as Amazon to satisfy its customers’ public cloud needs.

“In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, we will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, as a component of how we deliver these hybrid cloud solutions to enterprise customers,” Hilf said.

“Therefore, we will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on 31 January 2016.”

HP has been getting closer to Amazon of late as part of its hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus. It has also worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure, he added.

“We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure,” Hilf said.

HP invested more than $1bn in its cloud business over two years when it unveiled its Helion range of OpenStack-based cloud products and services last May so it looks half that money was lost.

HP teams up with Wind River on Open Stack

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News

founding_billDave_tcm_245_1630145Maker of jolly expensive printer ink, HP has forged a glorious alliance with Wind River to provide customers with a network functions virtualisation (NFV) solution based on HP’s Helion OpenStack.

Products which are spawned by the new alliance will enable carrier-grade   NFV capabilities.

The companies worked on the project jointly, taking the HP Helion OpenStack offering and Wind River’s carrier-grade technologies to further the already developing OpenStack NFV market. According to OpenStack-focused vendor Mirantis, telecommunications companies have been experiencing success with OpenStack-based NFV. Although still a new function, it appears that it is beginning to catch on with customers and vendors alike.

In a statement, the pair said that they wanted to create a product which allowed for the benefits of cloud computing, while meeting their rigorous reliability, performance and management requirements.

Saar Gillai, senior vice president and COO of HP Cloud and general manager for NFV at HP, in a prepared statement said the HP and Wind River project would provide a fully integrated and supported HP Helion cloud solution for carrier grade NFV.

“ We will also work together to enhance OpenStack technology to help ensure it evolves to meet carrier grade specifications,” Gillai said.

The new service will help cloud services providers compete better in a changing market. With the OpenStack NFV offering, HP and Wind River expect CSPs will be able to accelerate the transformation of their networks while also lower the total cost of ownership by adopting commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, they claim.

Carrier-grade NFV capabilities are not quite ready for customers, though. There is still some work to do to get the HP/WindRiver OpenStack NFV solution together, but the companies plan to launch in 2015.

Jim Douglas, senior vice president and CMO of Wind River said the telecom industry was eager to tap into the vast potential of NFV.

“By taking advantage of a virtualized or cloud environment, service providers can easily and quickly introduce new high-value services while reducing costs. In every case, maintaining carrier grade reliability is critical,” Douglas said.