HP automates hybrid clouds on CloudSystem

HP has introduced a feature to its CloudSystem appliance that lets it grab extra capacity and compute resources from other clouds, when needed.

The 'cloudbursting' feature, announced at HP Discover in Vienna on Wednesday, allows HP's CloudSystem appliance to automatically connect to external clouds when demand spikes.

"[CloudSystem] is an on-premise private cloud that provides out-of-the-box bursting," Steve Dietch, a vice president of marketing for HP, said. "In the first case out to Savvis, our partner, and we're going to be expanding it [to other clouds] in 2012."

The cloud will eventually support HP's OpenStack-based public cloud, Dietch said.

"We're going to eat our own dog food, we are quite capable of bursting to our own cloud as well," he said.

HP launched the CloudSystem appliance in January. It is a part of the company's converged infrastructure approach which sees it mix self-developed storage, servers and networking technologies together, along with its own software. The appliances are built on top of HP's BladeSystem Matrix.

The technology became available on Wednesday to CloudSystem appliances. Pricing details were not disclosed.

HP's converged infrastructure strategy bears similarities to approaches taken by Oracle and IBM. IBM puts a large emphasis on building hardware and software together, while Oracle has relentlessly sought to tweak its hardware to get the most from its database software, and vice versa.