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.

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.

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:

On May 25, CNBC aired a video segment on ‘Profiting on Cloud Computing’ where John Fortt, CNBC analyst, talked about the potential losers in cloud computing are companies that have dominant high margin positions that were dependent on the old model.  He cited Cisco, SAP, Microsoft, HP and Intel (on the client side) while mentioning HP’s advantage on the server side.  Yes. Business models are changing, not only for the technology titans, but also for enterprises, government and service providers.   

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...

I have sat down with many customers across the globe for the past few years and have listened to them intently on their desire to move toward the cloud, their challenges and their fears, as well as the opportunities and benefits that they seek. 

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.

As usual there was plenty of blogs, articles and talk around cloud computing last week at HP.  Once again, here’s a round-up of recent cloud computing content that you might find of interest. 

Private clouds have a lot to offer IT departments looking to reorient themselves from delivering technology to delivering services that support overall business goals. Moving to a private cloud is a major step in this direction. This post outlines what you should consider as the absolute necessary prerequisites to build an effective private cloud for your organization.

Written by Mark Shoemaker

Mark Shoemaker is an HP Cloud Advisor and a 20-year industry veteran with experience covering the scope of cloud service management, cloud automation, visibility and control, bringing virtualization into the data center, standards, and public cloud versus private cloud considerations.

The cloud buzz continues here at HP.  Here are some related HP blogs and news items that you might find interesting.

HP is fully immersed in cloud computing.  Cloud is one of the major areas of focus for our R&D team and we have various engineering and product development teams across a variety of disciplines working to further cloud computing.  As a result, cloud is a big topic here.  I thought you might be interested in some of the other HP cloud blogs and news published.

• HP recently announced the formation of a team of uber-experts.  Called the cloud advisory team, this group has a combined experience of nearly 200 years of technical, strategic, visionary and real-world experience.  More details in this Market Watch article.
• Interested in a new cloud boot camp or want a cloud readiness tool?  Learn more in this blog post from Charlie Bess talking about HP at VM World.   
•  What are the characteristics that make Private Cloud so attractive to enterprise businesses?  What are the fundamentals you should consider?  Learn here: Private Cloud via HP Converged Infrastructure – Foreshadowing the blue skies ahead.
• Want to access your cloud readiness?  Use this new tool to rate your cloud readiness.
• Last week we announced the acquisition of Denver-based Stratavia, a privately held database and application automation company, that will bolster our automation portfolio and bring more of that to the cloud.  More in this press release. And then read Mike Shaw’s blog about why this acquisition is important to you.