There is still confusion about cloud. There, I said it.  After reviewing white papers and marketing collaterals I noticed there is some confusion between hybrid cloud and converged cloud. This material was written by industry watchers and marketers. These are people who work with Cloud every day. Some people inter-changeably use converged cloud and hybrid cloud as if they have the same meaning.  Some do not know what converged cloud means.  So, I wrote down what I think the differences are between these two offerings.

Business’ are now demanding a lot from their clouds. They want a solution that doesn't lock them into single vendors or single delivery models. For example, they want the flexibility to be able to develop applications in the public cloud and bring them back into private clouds when the applications are in full production. They also want the flexibility to be able to burst applications and workloads to public or hybrid clouds during peak transaction times.

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.

Written by: Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Service Automation

This week at Discover 2012, HP announced a new version of HP Cloud Service Automation, available as a core element of CloudSystem Enterprise or as a standalone software product, for managing private and hybrid clouds. As a key element in HP’s Converged Cloud strategy, HP Cloud Service Automation is the industry’s most comprehensive, unified solution for brokering and managing application and infrastructure services in private and hybrid clouds, helping IT organizations increase agility and reduce cost, via a self-service portal and highly-automated lifecycle management. 

HP, my dedicated co-workers, and I are proud to announce HP CloudSystem Matrix and HP CloudSystem Matrix Software version 7.1 today. This release has a combination of new features as well as improvements to existing functionality. A lot of this work is based on ideas and feedback from our customers - so thank you for providing your input!

Some of the new features include:

by Paul Muller, VP of Strategic Marketing

Have you noticed the private cloud bashing lately? 

Instead of “either/or,” I believe it’s a question of knowing where and when...

It’s that time of year when you see a lot of “top ten this” and “top ten that” lists.  So I thought I would research which Grounded in the Cloud blog posts were the most popular in 2010 based on total readership.  I haven’t ranked them in a particular order because some of them are very close and the traffic counts vary from day to day. 

Drum roll, please.  Here are the ten most popular Grounded in the Cloud blog posts of 2010.

Whether it’s a mine rescue or a new cloud project, you need fully-functioning governance and precision of execution for optimal success. Read what an HP CTO and an HP enterprise architect have to say about the importance of embedding strong governance—using frameworks such as ITIL—for cloud implementations.