With just about every major vendor in the enterprise pledged to support the emerging OpenStack framework for managing IT in a cloud computing environment, it was only a matter of time before one of them took the next logical step for creating an actual operating system environment for the cloud.
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At the HP Discover 2013 conference this week, Hewlett-Packard unveiled HP Cloud OS, which it describes as a platform that IT organizations can deploy on a public or private cloud to create a common framework for managing both environments.
According to Wendy Cartee, vice president of marketing for HP Converged Cloud, HP Cloud is a suite of HP technologies that abstracts the infrastructure layer in a way that makes cloud computing easier to deploy and manage. In addition, Carte says HP Cloud OS provides IT organizations with a suite of tools that not only reduces the cost of managing IT in the cloud, it makes the entire IT organization more agile because it significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to stand up a cloud application.
To make it easier to get started with HP Cloud OS, the new platform can be acquired as part of HP Cloud System, which now includes an enterprise starter system that provides a turnkey HP Cloud OS environment. HP is also making available an HP Cloud OS Sandbox implementation of the platform that customers can install for free.
Finally, HP also announced that the HP Cloud OS would be available on HP Moonshot servers, a next-generation data center platform built around low-energy Atom processors that HP introduced earlier this year.
While OpenStack may not be ready for the average enterprise to digest, Cartee says in the form of HP Cloud OS, the technologies that make OpenStack become much more accessible.
It probably won’t be long before VMware and Microsoft or their system vendor partners start referring to extensions to their rival cloud management frameworks as operating systems. The degree to which that terminology takes hold remains to be seen. But what is clear is that to make frameworks such as OpenStack more consumable in the enterprise, they need to do a lot more than make OpenStack technologies in their rawest form simply available for download on a “do it yourself” basis.
