HP Banks On Cloud And Backup To Assist Recovery

HP has announced some fresh cloud computing and backup products as CEO Meg Whitman looks to galvanise the troubled company this week.

The Silicon Valley giant is currently hosting its HP Discover event in Las Vegas, where it introduced some additional Converged Cloud offerings. This included a hybrid cloud for the airline industry, with a vision of an “Intelligent Airline Cloud,” which would deliver “integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms”.

HP’s CloudSystem IaaS platform now offers extra capacity over Amazon Web Services and Savvis.

Converged cloud

“Successful organisations need to be able to select the right delivery model for their technology needs whether it be in the cloud or on premise,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer at HP. “HP’s Converged Cloud approach provides enterprises choice in delivery model and platform with the confidence in the service delivered via market leading products, coupled with a consistent architecture and experience.”

HP also introduced what it claims is a record backup performance of 100TB/hour in its new deduplication solutions for the StoreOnce Backup lineup. That makes the products up to three times faster than the closest competitive offering, HP said.

“Clients are struggling with complex, incompatible storage solutions that are costly, hard to manage, underutilised and built for the past,” added Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager for HP’s enterprise group.

“HP is transforming the storage industry with simplified and converged solutions that span from the midrange to the high end of the enterprise, enabling organisations to maximise the value from their information in the most efficient way possible.”

HP has had a tough year, in which it has posted poor results and announced major job cuts. In May, it confirmed 27,000 jobs were to go over the next two years, whilst at the same time noting revenues had declined three percent year-over-year.

The company has been shaking up its leadership team too and last week  announced venture capitalist and IBM veteran George Kadifa was to become executive vice president of HP’s software business. It is also embroiled in a legal tussle with former ally Oracle, over allegations that Larry Ellison’s firm violated contract agreements when it decided to stop supporting Intel’s Itanium processors in database software.

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