Creating the recipe for the perfect Cloud Map

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Written by Gary Stevens – HP Cloud Maps Global Business Development Manager

Have you ever wanted put on your chef’s hat and whip up a special meal to celebrate a special occasion? You read through a few of the latest food magazines to see what ’jumps’ out at you. In addition you ask a few friends what they’ve recently had to see if one of those meals connects with what you have in mind. You seem to be having little luck in your pursuit of the perfect meal when suddenly as you are watching television, you see a commercial about some new widget for your house and there on the dining room table is “exactly what you want to make”.  You see what looks like roasted meat with a dough wrapping, and a few bowls of colorful fall vegetables, and what is that potato dish?  As you lean in to get a better look at what must surely be desert - your regularly scheduled program suddenly re-appears. You say to yourself, “Well, at least I know what I want; I now need to figure out how to make it happen”. While you may understand what you’d like to have you may or may not have the skill sets to make it happen.

IT departments are constantly hit with requests from within their own companies for new services that they want. These services can add value to the whole organization, like instant messaging or shared collaboration spaces. Sometimes these services add value to just a single team, like a better way to build “test and development” environments or perhaps a small database to number crunch some results from a recent marketing exercise. Many times, the users know what they want, and it is up to the IT team to “make it happen.” The challenge arises when the IT team is asked to do something that they may not have done before or haven’t done in quite some time, and with constant movement of resources, you may be presented with a task just like our friend was with his desire to create the perfect meal. As with the special meal you wanted to create everyone in the IT shop may understand what is desired for the new app you need, but very few people may know what to do next to make it happen.

One of the things about HP that sets us apart from many of the other vendors in this space is the depth and breadth of our relationships with our solution and alliance partners. These are the partners like Microsoft, SAP, VMware and Red Hat with whom HP has long and strong relationships spanning decades and has developed and delivered 1000’s of solutions to our joint customers to solve their business challenges. With recent shifts in the marketplace, customers are looking for application deployment strategies using more cloud and service delivery models.  HP understands what customers are looking for and is right there to provide these “new” cloud services in an optimized and orchestrated way that keeps risk low and service satisfaction high. HP can do this by combining the years of experience with these Solution partners and their applications with our own knowledge of what is the right hardware platform to solve the current challenge. We call these combinations or “recipes” HP Cloud Maps.

HP Cloud Maps combine years of installation experiences, partner application best practices, intimate knowledge of equipment capabilities and optimal application functionality into a package that our customers can use to quickly and consistently deploy applications and services with HP’s Cloud Platform environment. HP Cloud Maps can reduce the time to deploy many business applications from several months in some cases down to a single day. With Cloud Maps, our customers can do this repeatedly and consistently without risk that something will unexpectedly change between the last time this service was deployed and the next. I consider myself a pretty good amateur cook, but if I found a way to make a great meal every time I tried and not have to worry too much about the Kitchen equipment current conditions, what’s in the pantry and most importantly using the exact right mix of ingredients (because someone else has taken care of that), I’d be using that method to make my dinners from now on.

HP Cloud Maps provide the experience and the right mix of hardware and software technology and settings to help you deploy applications and services in HP Cloud Environments with minimal risk, and maximum value. If HP also makes a “Meal Map’ that can flawlessly make Beef wellington, glazed baby carrots and mushrooms, Potato Gratin and Crème Brulee for my friend’s birthday next week, I think I’ll be in heaven. In the mean time, if you are interested in knowing more about HP Cloud Maps and how our over 150 application HP Cloud Map “recipes” can help your IT team dramatically change how they deploy and service applications and requests from their line of business users, please have a look at our new HP Cloud Map video.

Chris

For more information on HP Converged Cloud visit www.hp.com/go/cloud

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