HP To Launch Helion Rack Cloud-In-A-Box System

Hewlett-Packard is expanding its roster of preconfigured systems for its Helion cloud portfolio with an offering based on open-source technologies like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and designed for private clouds for enterprises.

The tech giant has unveiled the HP Helion Rack, a pre-tested solution to make it easier and faster for organizations to deploy and manage their private clouds. The new offerings comes at a time when enterprise IT departments are increasingly morphing into server providers for their organizations, which means they’re under the same pressures to build out more flexible infrastructures and more quickly spin out services for end users.

Such preconfigured platforms like the Helion Rack take a lot of the work around designing, developing and launching such private clouds out of the equation, according to Bill Hilf, senior vice president of product management for HP’s Helion business.

“Enterprise customers are asking for private clouds that meet their security, reliability and performance requirements, while also providing the openness, flexibility and fast time-to-value they require,” Hilf said in a statement, adding that the Helion Rack with integrated application lifecycle management gives enterprises “The simplified cloud experience they want, with the control and performance they need.”

Established

HP launched its Helion cloud platform in May 2014, one of a number of established infrastructure providers coming out with broad cloud initiatives. For example, Cisco Systems’ Intercloud strategy just celebrated its first anniversary. For HP, Helion is based on its work with the OpenStack open-source cloud orchestration technology. At the same time, the company unveiled its own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology called the Helion Developer Platform, and three months later released Helion VPC Lean, a cloud service that is aimed at midsize businesses and enterprises that are looking to move such jobs as application development, software testing and workplace collaboration onto managed IaaS environments.

HP also grown its offerings of preconfigured infrastructures, most recently last month rolling out seven new preconfigured solutions aimed at a range of workloads, from lighter enterprise workloads to business-class applications, such as data mining and analytics to application development.

The Helion Rack—a 42U (73.5-inch) rack armed with ProLiant DL360 Gen9 servers as well as networking—offers an integrated infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-service (PaaS) capabilities. It comes with OpenStack capabilities and HP’s Helion Development Platform, which is based on the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS software.

The use of open-source software and industry-standard hardware helps speed up private cloud deployments, and the solution is installed on site by HP technicians, officials said.

It’s also designed for easy scaling, which is done by adding storage and compute nodes.

The Helion Rack will be available next month, with pricing varying depending on the configuration.

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Originally published on eWeek.