HP opens its own data centers to cloud customers

HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The crux of the announcement is that capacity will be organized into a more abstract service layer, whether it comes from within the enterprise itself, or from HP’s latest on-demand offerings.

This is a vision, actually, that has been talked about for years by the large infrastructure vendors. I remember 10 years ago when Sun’s irrepressible Scott McNealy talked about delivering compute capacity via a “Big Freakin’ Webtone Switch.” Around the same time, IBM began talking about building server farms that will deliver capacity on demand to customers from remote locations.

HP’s “Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service” (AIaaS — now there’s a mouthful) is particularly interesting, since its a data center offered through the cloud from HP. HP AIaaS offers customers access to HP-owned and managed data centers that deliver applocations such as Exchange and SAP. HP did not mention others, though it did leave the door open to “other critical business applications.”

HP also is offering a range of virtualization capabilities which it calls HP Data Center Virtualization services, along with virtualization software, which supports all kinds of virtualization across servers, storage, networks and applications.

The move to cloud-based data centers continues, and thanks to high bandwidth networks, is technically feasible. Today’s economics is also helping to fuel this decade-old dream: the costs of building and maintaining data centers that can keep growing with demands for more data and digitalization of processes are going through the roof. Energy is one cost drain, but simply being able to find, train, and retain staff talent required to keep things going is a huge budget item. Tapping into data centers in the cloud offers a more incrementally priced alternative.