Last week, I attended HP’s Converged Cloud Tech Day in Puerto Rico. Fellow colleagues attended from North, Latin and South America. The purpose of the event was to 1) take a deep dive into HP’s cloud offerings and 2) visit HP’s Aguadilla location, which houses manufacturing and an HP Labs presence. What makes the story interesting is that HP is a hardware manufacturer, a software provider and a provider of cloud services. Overall, I was very impressed by what HP is doing…but read on for the reasons why…and the surprises.
HP Puerto Rico
HP, like many other technology companies, has a significant presence in Puerto Rico. Martin Castillo, HP’s Caribbean Region Country Manager provided an overview for the group that left many in awe. HP exports a whopping $11.5b from Puerto Rico or roughly 10% of HP’s global revenue. In the Caribbean, HP holds more than 70% of the server market. Surprisingly, much of the influence to use HP cloud services in Puerto Rico comes from APAC and EMEA, not North America. To that end, 90% of HP’s Caribbean customers are already starting the first stage of moving to private clouds. Like others, HP is seeing customers move from traditional data centers to private clouds to managed clouds to public clouds.
Moving to the Cloud
Not surprisingly, HP is going through a transition by presenting the company from a solutions perspective rather than a product perspective. Shane Pearson, HP’s VP of Portfolio & Product Management explained that “At the end of the day, it’s all about applications and workloads. Everyone sees the importance of cloud, but everyone is trying to figure out how to leverage it.” By 2015 the projected markets are: Traditional $1.4b, Private Cloud $47b, Managed Cloud $55b, Public Cloud $30b for a cloud total of $132b. In addition, HP confirmed Hybrid Cloud approach as the approach of choice.
While customers are still focused on cost savings as the primary motivation to move to cloud, the tide is shifting to business process improvement. Put another way, cloud is allowing users to do things they could not do before. I was pleased to hear HP offer that it’s hard to take advantage of cloud if you don’t leverage automation. Automation and Orchestration are essential to cloud deployments.
HP CloudSystem Matrix
HP’s Nigel Cook was up next to talk about HP’s CloudSystem Matrix. Essentially, HP is (and has been) providing cloud services across the gamut of potential needs. Internally, HP is using OpenStack as the foundation for their cloud service offering. But CloudSystem Matrix provides a cohesive solution to manage across both internal and external cloud services. To the earlier point about automation, HP is focusing on automation and self-service as part of their cloud offering. Having a solution that helps customers manage the complexity that Hybrid Clouds presents could prove interesting. Admittedly, I have not kicked the tires of CloudSystem Matrix yet, but on the surface, it is very impressive.
Reference Architecture
During the visit to Aguadilla, we joined a Halo session with HP’s Christian Verstraete to discuss architecture. Christian and team have built an impressive cloud functional reference architecture. As impressive as it is, one challenge is how to best leverage such a comprehensive model for the everyday IT organization. It’s quite a bit to chew off. Very large enterprises can consume the level of detail contained within the model. Others will need a way to consume it in chunks. Christian goes into much greater depth in a series of blog entries on HP’s Cloud Source Blog.
HP Labs: Data Center in a Box
One treat on the trip was the visit to HP Labs. If you ever get the opportunity to visit HP Labs, it’s well worth the time to see what innovative solutions the folks are cooking up. HP demonstrated the results from their Thermal Zone Mapping (TZM) tool (US Patent 8,249,841) along with CFD modeling tools and monitoring to determine details around airflow/ cooling efficiency. While I’ve seen many different modeling tools, HP’s TZM was pretty impressive.
In addition to the TZM, HP shared a new prototype that I called Data Center in a Box. The solution is an encapsulated rack system that supports 1-8 racks that are fully enclosed. The only requirement is power and chilled water. The PUE numbers were impressive, but didn’t take into account every metric (ie: the cost of chilled water). Regardless, I thought the solution was pretty interesting. The HP folks kept mentioning that they planned to target the solution to Small-Medium Business (SMB) clients. While that may have been interesting to the SMB market a few years ago, today the SMB market is moving more to services (ie: Cloud Services). That doesn’t mean the solution is DOA. I do think it could be marketed as a modular approach to data center build-outs that provides a smaller increment to container solutions. Today, the solution is still just a prototype and not commercially available. It will be interesting to see where HP ultimately takes this.
In Summary
I was quite impressed by HP’s perspective on how customers can…and should leverage cloud. I felt they have a healthy perspective on the market, customer engagement and opportunity. However, I was left with one question: Why are HP’s cloud solutions not more visible? Arguably, I am smack in the middle of the ‘cloud stream’ of information. Sure, I am aware that HP has a cloud offering. However, when folks talk about different cloud solutions, HP is noticeably absent. From what I learned last week, this needs to change.
HP’s CloudSystem Matrix is definitely worth a look regardless of the state of your cloud strategy. And for data center providers and service providers, keep an eye out for their Data Center in a Box…or whatever they ultimately call it.