HP is looking to make it easy for companies to step on the cloud. They are offering a solution called HP CloudStart that will deliver a fully functional cloud onto your site in 30 days or less. For companies looking to give cloud technology a spin, CloudStart is an easy first step with the ability to grow as cloud adoption grows in your company.
CloudStart is a fixed-engagement service from HP’s to deliver a fully functional cloud and system library to your site. As a starter kit, it is fully functional and allow you the basic building blocks to begin deploying systems in a fully-automated cloud on your premises.
The CloudStart option comes with the CloudSystem Matrix software package that ships with CloudSystem (covered here, earlier). One of the major values of HP CloudSystem and CloudStart are the pre-defined workflows to setup and deploy applications on the cloud, something HP called CloudMaps. HP has spent a considerable amount of time with their software partners developing the CloudMap workflows to deploy their software successfully in a fraction of the time normally required. As part of the services engagement, HP will also work with you to bring up four fully functional applications on the cloud.
CloudStart and CloudSystem delivers a multi-vendor cloud system natively, with support VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix. During the HP Discover this year, I was able to talk with one of the CloudSystem architects about the CloudStart option in more detail. Something I found surprisingly refreshing, is that HP is supporting third party server and storage hardware with CloudSystem, making it truly multi-vendor at all levels, so customers have choice. Although CloudStart is more of a fixed delivery, customers are free to choose your hypervisor, storage, and x86-based servers in the future and avoid vendor lock-in.
CRN reports that the all-inclusive price for a CloudStart system is $450,000. For an all-inclusive set of servers, storage, networking, it doesn’t sound like a bad price to me.
