You may have heard HP Helion public cloud is closing down. Did you know this was great news for partners? It's OK, you'd be forgiven for thinking HP could have communicated that better.
As described in a blog last week by the vendor's senior VP and general manager of HP Cloud, Bill Hilf, the Helion public cloud will sunset on 31 January 2016.
To repeat, the public cloud is being sunset. But HP's OpenStack strategy is not being put out to pasture. The focus will now be on hosting applications in Helion-certified partner data centres. Buried at the end of the fourth paragraph of the blog is the crucial message, that HP "will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities".
If this sounds familiar, it's because this is the same Helion model already planned for Australia, which I revealed back in April. HP is trying to forge a local Helion Network, a coalition of HP partners to host customer workloads on verified Helion architecture. (HP admitted in July that it was pursuing this model.)
I can only assume that the local HP team was thrown into a spin by Bill Hilf's blog and the ensuing media coverage, and for good reason. It's easy to imagine readers misinterpreting the sunsetting of HP Helion public cloud as a plan to kill off HP Helion full stop. I'll wager some HP partners still have the wrong message, especially those who thought HP already pulled the pin on public cloud earlier this year.
Let's not forget that in April, Bill Hilf's interview with the New York Times led many to believe HP was quitting public cloud. A week later Hilf backtracked on this message. Now we know he was being honest the whole time.
So what is the Helion strategy? Helion is an umbrella term for myriad HP technologies (even close HP partners tell me they are unclear exactly where Helion begins and ends). The overarching piece is HP Helion CloudSystem, Bill Hilf told CRN's US sister title on Friday. CloudSystem is a "factory-installed virtual appliance, one of our converged infrastructure systems. It is basically a private cloud in a box. It has Helion OpenStack. It has our development platform, our management tools, our orchestration tools, all prebuilt in an easy-to-use solution. Even within the box it is a virtual appliance, very easy to deploy and manage," said Hilf.
Helion plays friendly with public clouds, especially Amazon Web Services. HP acquired Eucalyptus in 2014 to allow seamless interoperability with AWS.
One Australian managed services partner running this kind of private cloud stack is Melbourne-based Blue Apache, a six-time CRN Fast50 company. Blue Apache has spent millions to develop a platform using HP Helion CloudSystem with the HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blade servers and HP 3PAR StoreServ storage. Blue Apache is already tapping into Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, depending on client preference, managing director Chris Marshall tells me.
Most customers are well-versed in AWS, and are increasingly using Azure. They can also choose from IBM SoftLayer, VMware vCloud Air and Cisco Intercloud. They didn't need another option from HP, and the death of Helion public cloud should be seen as one less distraction for a vendor already grappling with some pretty major internal changes.
What HP's channel tells me is they were never interested in an HP public cloud. To paraphrase one Sydney gold partner, HP should just focus on making great server, storage and networking technology, "and we'll keep selling it".
Steven Kiernan is editor of CRN Australia
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