Are you attending SAP Sapphire 2013? If you are, we have a few suggestions for cloud solution demos you will not want to miss.

These demos have been specifically designed for SAP landscapes, and will demonstrate what is possible when the power of HP and SAP come together. Keep reading to find out how you can benefit from this partnership.

Earlier today, HP announced the technical preview of HP CloudSystem support for OpenStack-based Red Hat KVM resource pools. What does this mean and why is it important?

Some of our existing customers focus primarily use a single hypervisor today. This hypervisor is often a full feature virtualization platform that provides a robust infrastructure that works well for traditional enterprise applications. However, many, if not most, of those customers are already deploying or considering moving to a multi-hypervisor model.

This is the third post summarizing the major lessons of the new eBook, “How to Take Advantage of the Cloud: Your Guide to Achieving Value and Performance,” by HP and Latisys (one of HP’s first bursting partners). Previously, we addressed “Cloud basics” using the phrase “how to harness the cloud as part of your IT strategy and “Cloud essentials” using the phrase “disaster recovery, storage, security, and compliance. In this post we’ll examine challenges to making the cloud work and challenges that should not be taken lightly.

Written by Gary Stevens – HP Global Business Development Manager

Have you ever planned a dinner party and found, usually at the last minute, that the pan you intend to use for the main course... (you know the course! it's the one you have been making for smaller groups of friends for the past month) but the pan just isn’t big enough. You do a quick check of your memory banks and are convinced that you had the “do I need a bigger pan conversation” with yourself.

It's exciting to see customers moving from a virtualized environment towards a hybrid cloud environment.  With HP CloudSystem customers are creating test and development environments, building and managing core applications in the cloud, providing cloud services to others, and creating new lines of business. 

NNIT, a subsidiary of the healthcare supplier Novo Nordisk, a Danish IT service provider has approximately 1,500 employees in five countries.  They were looking to move to a cloud environment to lower operating costs, automate processes and create new value-added services.

This makes some interesting reading if you have time, on a company called Digital Planet. I am always interested to hear about companies like this that are transitioning to the Cloud. We talked about it a lot at HP Discover this year and even had some interesting guest speakers from Latisys and Mckesson Health Care that were there sharing their experiences with Cloud.

Digital Planet who is based in Ireland, has been working with many clients during the past 12 months, moving to a new cloud environment. Leveraging HP’s CloudSystem, they have been able to optimize their business offering; increasing revenue while reducing costs and achieving a 96% ROI over the ten months of operation. It’s an interesting article that is worth a read.

Chris

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At HP, we believe that customers will all have a unique journey to their cloud environment. The first steps often include standardization, consolidation, virtualization and automation and then building to an internal IT Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering.

One of the other key things we have learned from working with thousands of customers is that cloud implementations often have a bigger impact on the people and process of IT than on the technology of IT. Therefore, it is often good to start with a small project - often internal IT focused - to understand how cloud will impact the unique processes and the people in that specific organization before growing to a larger implementation. In other words, many organizations will want to start small and grow tall.

As a business owner, would you open a store without any process to charge back your merchandise? As a user, would you buy a service without knowing the cost upfront? This kind of cost management requirements applies to cloud computing. While cloud computing promises many opportunities for IT cost savings, its diverse and dynamic nature also makes it difficult to reap the expected financial benefits.

At HP Discover 2012 you’ll get direct access to all the leading Cloud subject matter experts from HP, HP Partners and peers, to help answer and address the most challenging technical questions related to Converged Cloud security, application and cloud services, HP CloudSystem,  application lifecycle management, cloud virtualization, networking, etc. 

Leverage thousands of HP and customer hours of experience and best known methods for building and managing cloud services with HP cloud solutions and services at HP Discover Las Vegas 2012.

As you can probably tell I am kicking myself for having been delayed catching my connection and ultimately missing my flight up to Montreal to participate in the cloud roadshow. Oh well, I get another chance this Tuesday when the third venue pulls into Toronto, Canada.

If you are interested in watching cloud videos, here is a collection of 3 that were filmed at the event (2 more to follow). Two were filmed with HP’s Cloud Advisors that were filmed with our cloud advisors that were present at the event, and the other with Raffal Los, chief security evangelist with HP software.

I was in Vienna for the HP Discover technology show last week and I heard both from the press. If you were followingHP Discover or the Cloud announcement activities last Wednesday, you would have found a pretty lengthy list of new cloud programs. So wiener schnitzel or smorgasbord?

If you have been keeping up with the cloud news this week you will have heard that on Oct 18th, HP announced new cloud programs and services to assist customers in making the transition to the Cloud easier and faster with HP CloudSystem. The announcement and press event was hosted out of Singapore in the APJ region.

I think we get caught up some times thinking that as reliable as cloud computing has started to become, and that because it’s “in the cloud”, the separation of hardware reliability, from users processing work in the cloud has truly happened. Less attention is being paid to the actual hardware running the cloud.

To demonstrate reliable private cloud implementations for mission critical computing, HP and Intel jointly announced a new HP Cloud Reference Architecture, featuring new Integrity blades I2 servers with Intel® Itanium® 9300 Series. Acting as the HP EMEA Cloud Center of Excellence, the HP Intel CME Solution Center from Grenoble France has implemented a new Cloud Infrastructure for mission-critical environments.

Cloud is becoming top of mind for a lot of CIO’s and business managers alike, as they start to chart their journey into the cloud. But like all new technology introductions, it starts to become a little overwhelming to understand the all the new terminology associated with this topic. Things like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS to name a few…what do they mean and what are the real differences between them?

If you are getting a chance to go to HP Discover, here’s an interesting session to look out for. It's about a company called FICO that successfully implemented a 90 day transition into the Cloud using HP CloudSystem Matrix.

 As early as 2009, customers choosing KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) have relied on HP BladeSystem and ProLiant servers to provide the foundation of their virtualization infrastructure, (which is the precursor of cloud computing.) For example, ByteMark, a hosting provider in the UK, could improve their SLA from three 9s to four 9s by running KVM on BL495 servers with Virtual Connect Flex-10 modules. 

It hard to believe it has been a full year since I was last posting blog updates on the Red Hat Summit. Last year the big news for HP was all around our recently announced scale-up server - HP ProLiant DL980. It was big news and it attracted a lot of attention.