On the heels of its aggressive bid to acquire cloud computing data storage specialist 3PAR, HP today unveiled a new offering intended to enable customers to quickly implement private cloud computing environments.
Comprising existing HP hardware, software, and service products, the new HP CloudStart bundle allows customers to deploy private clouds within 30 days of installing server and storage hardware, HP said.
Like public cloud computing environments such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, private clouds centralize computing and storage power that can be quickly and easily provisioned as business requirements change. Unlike public clouds, however, private clouds operate behind a corporate firewall or in a custom array at an offsite data center.
Larger server and storage equipment vendors, including HP, Dell, and IBM, are rushing to fill out their cloud computing offerings as the market for such products and services grows. IDC predicts spending on cloud computing will increase from $16.5 billion in 2009 to $55.5 billion in 2014.