So there is a bit of buzz surrounding HP’s most recent endeavor that being it entering into the Cloud Business and attempting to compete with Amazon Web Services. As we all know HP has not been very successful lately and it is curious to see HP trying to get into this market so late in the game and I really wonder is this is the best strategy for them.
Anyways here is my impression of HP Cloud Services which I had an opportunity to test drive….
Services
HP Cloud Services offers the most basic of cloud services including compute and storage instances and the run of the mill CDN (Content Distribution Network) notably they currently only offer one geolocation to deploy instances and although I will not disclose where that data center is I will say that the location was not to be expected.
In comparison to Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid and other providers I would say at this point HP Cloud Services really doesn’t pass muster and could not easily compete.
Web Based Management
HP Cloud Services has a easy to use well designed account manager that allows you to rapidly deploy instances one of the odd things I noticed was HP calls their images AMI’s just like Amazon yet AMI stands for “Amazon Machine Images” and really HP offers a very slim amount of AMI’s (Mostly Ubuntu Server Images) to choose from.
Notably the deployment of instances seemed to be much quicker than AWS which in my experience can sometimes take a few minutes.
Conclusion
Since pricing and other information is not yet available since the Beta is free it is hard to do a full comparison but if HP Cloud Services were to become available right now I would find it hard for businesses to migrate from AWS which is much more robust in its offerings to the so far very barebones service HP has lined up.
And here is a token screenshot (Click to Enlarge):
