So, you think OpenStack is perfect for your company's cloud-needs, but you just discovered that finding OpenStack-savvy architects, designers, or even just administrators is like looking for the perfect New York style pizza... in San Diego.
As Tom Norton, HP's vice president of Helion Professional Services, said in a statement, "OpenStack technology is gaining traction in the enterprise, but the lack of in-house OpenStack expertise can be a barrier to realizing the technology’s full potential."
HP has help for you: HP Helion OpenStack Professional Services. This is a package of service offerings which HP claims "are delivered by an experienced team of HP architects and cloud technologists, and backed by hundreds of engineers who run one of the world’s largest OpenStack public clouds — HP Helion Public Cloud." HP says that this crew has "extensive expertise in design, storage, network, security, database, scalability, high-availability and other OpenStack-based services."
This new service includes:
- OpenStack technology assessment: Consultants work with customers to understand their desired business outcomes and identify a strategy to achieve them—defining the appropriate cloud workload deployment model (private, managed, public or hybrid) and recommending proof-of-concept, pre-production or production environments.
- OpenStack technology design and implementation: Best practices are used to architect cloud infrastructures, facilitate workload migrations and proof-of-concept projects, or integrate OpenStack technology deployments into a pre-production environment for testing.
- OpenStack technology accelerator: Rapid deployment of OpenStack technology for trial, development environment or a standard deployment with a fixed service.
- OpenStack technology optimization: Ongoing life cycle management of cloud deployments, including remote capacity and performance monitoring services, continuous integration and patching, and 24/7 support. Also includes training and certification of IT staff and partners to integrate and administer OpenStack solutions.
When you put it all together, HP is not offering to run your cloud for you, although they'd be happy to do that too, but to help you work out how to set up your own OpenStack cloud.
As Jonathan Bryce, the OpenStack Foundation's director, said in a statement:
Organizations implementing OpenStack cloud solutions often rely on our broad ecosystem to augment their staff and move faster. Companies like HP, who are strong contributors to the project, can help these organizations be confident in their OpenStack deployments by providing access to additional expertise.
HP Helion OpenStack Professional Services are available globally and include support for all OpenStack projects. HP also states that they can help customize OpenStack for particular business niches. Pricing varies based on a customer’s individual requirements.
HP is far from the only company backing OpenStack with services. Mirantis, Red Hat, and Canonical all have such offerings. Even Microsoft is putting OpenStack on its menu.
What HP offers that no one, not even Dell with its Red Hat OpenStack partnership can, is that it can put hardware, software, and services on a customer's plate. I suspect that many enterprise customers will find this a very attractive dish.
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