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Sunday, 16 June 2013

[New post] HP Cloud scores big customer win; passle of PaaS moves: The week in cloud

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HP Cloud scores big customer win; passle of PaaS moves: The week in cloud

by Barb Darrow

HP trumpets big cloud win

HP COO Bill Veghte

Hewlett-Packard (s hpq) claimed a big win at its Discover Conference last week. On the final day of the show, COO Bill Veghte told attendees that Workday(s wday), the human resources SaaS firm that's giving Oracle(s orcl) fits, has moved from Amazon(s amzn) Web Services to HP Cloud, according to CRN.

The company also trotted out HP Cloud OS, based on standard OpenStack infrastructure but with some of its own bells and whistles not yet supported in OpenStack itself. But, true to HP's hardware roots, you can't get the software without buying some HP boxes-- initially it comes with HP CloudSystem and Moonshot servers, according to PC World.

Not to be outdone, Red Hat, which also targets enterprise cloud workloads , officially announced Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) which melds the company's virtualization, namesake Linux, and Red Hat's OpenStack implementation and the related but somehow not equal Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Frankly, I'm unclear about the difference between the two so will circle back later on that.

In the public cloud arena, Red Hat is also now offering a free tier of Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances running on AWS to a select group of users.

Red Hat, HP, Rackspace(s rax) and the rest of the EBA (Everyone But Amazon) cohort is stressing choice of cloud deployment models -- the pitch is that while AWS public cloud is great for many workloads, it's not optimal for companies that want to split or move workloads between private and public clouds.

And, for those of you sick of the OpenStack schtick, buck up, CloudStack Collaboration 2013 kicks off in Sunnyvale in two weeks.

Lots of PaaS action

There was lots of moving and shaking in the Platform-as-a-Service world last week as Pivotal launched Version 2 of its Cloud Foundry platform as a paid-only service (there used to be a free version.) and CenturyLink(s ctl) /Savvis bought AppFog, a member of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem to make it part of its Savvis Cloud lineup. Oh, and Red Hat made OpenShift, its corporate-focused PaaS, broadly available.

As James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry put it, this soft launch of the hosted service is ongoing, with invitations going out to current 1.0 users daily. The idea is to have a "publicly available on-prem enterprise edition (software based) in Q4 -- that product is in early access mode with select paid customers," Watters said via email.

Watters claims that running an app on Cloud Foundry Version 2's developer tier is actually cheaper than running it on AWS small or medium instances -- the type that Amazon's Beanstalk PaaS would use.

Cloud Foundry 2.0 does not incorporate the Pivotal HD data fabric. That will come in the fourth quarter aas part of the enterprise edition. And more of those data goodies will be incorporated into the regular Cloud Foundry 2.0 service over time.

PaaS adoption may be high among developers in small shops and startups, but enterprises remain a quandary for PaaS vendors and among companies that do look to PaaSes, Microsoft(s msft) Azure is a strong contender which shouldn't reaqlly be surprising given Windows and .NET adoption in large companies.

"Microsoft is the current leader among PaaSes for enterprise users, followed by Salesforce.com(s crm) and Google(s goog) with Cloud Foundry bringing up the rear," said 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks, citing his company's research. "There's still a wide gap between the web kids' online application playground and the enterprise," he said.

CenturyLink's buyout of AppFog indicates the pressure that telcos and hosting providers are feeling to provide slick cloud-like services for developers as well as CIOs. Several folks on Twitter and other outlets predicted more M&A in this space as those companies seek to compete with Amazon Web Services.