HP to offer enterprise cloud on demand

HP has unveiled its enterprise cloud service compute strategy, which will offer UK users computing on demand from its Wynyard datacentre.

Businesses will be able to purchase storage, security and networking as part of the service, which HP said built on its established hosting and outsourcing businesses. David Chalmers, HP's UK & Ireland storage and server chief technology officer said, "ECS is a fundamental move from hosting and outsourcing. HP can manage the whole stack."

HP's vision is to offer IT departments a choice: on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, virtualised and physical infrastructure. "Businesses can mix their IT environment," said Chalmers.

HP is also releasing a new blade server, the HP Cloud System, which allows IT staff to deploy VMWare, Hyper-V, Citrix and HPUX hypervisors. The HP Cloud System includes Cloud Service Automation, a suite of system administration tools. The suite offers resource management, application deployment, configuration management and a single portal for managing private and public clouds on physical and virtualised IT infrastructure.

Although HP will be operating ECS, Chalmers said the company would not be replacing its partner channel. Service providers could offer customer a bursting facility when they exceeded the limits within ECS, he added.