HP takes IaaS out of beta

HP has brought its Cloud Compute infrastructure-as-a-service platform out of beta overnight while launching fresh beta programs for new cloud services — block storage and application-as-a-service.

Cloud Compute customers have the option of several Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora and Debian; or the 32 and 64 bit variants of Windows Server 2008 SP2, as well as Windows Server Enterprise Edition R2 64-bit.

Prices range from four US cents an hour for one virtual core, one gigabyte of memory and 30 gigabytes of storage for extra small instances, up to the 32-unit double extra large size that costs $US1.28 an hour and provides eight virtual cores, 32 gigabytes of RAM and 960 GB of storage.

HP is offering to halve the above prices until January next year as part of a launch promotion and has committed to an availability guarantee of 99.95 per cent or more of the time in a given calendar month, as part of the service level agreement for Cloud Compute.

Should HP fail to keep to its SLA, credits of five to 30 percent will be issued to customers.

To further entice customers to the HP Cloud Services, the company is offering a free 1000 unit-hours a month trial with up to 160GB of storage and 125GB of CDN bandwidth per month. This, HP said, is enough to run an extra small Linux instance around the clock for the entire month.

HP's services are based on the open source OpenStack platform which is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license.

A public beta of the HP Cloud Block Storage service was also announced, again with a half-price deal while the system is being tried out.

Cloud Block Storage promotional pricing is set at five US cents a gigabyte a month currently, compared to ten cents normally. 

The firm also started taking applications to participate in a private beta for its CloudFoundry Open PaaS-based service, called HP Cloud Application as a Service.

It targets the development, deployment and management of cloud applications and was announced together with an Enterprise Application Migration to the Cloud solutions package.