HP to develop cloud services platform for enterprises
HP's Cirious platform for delivering cloud services will address the security and scalability needs of large enterprise customers, the company says
Hewlett-Packard has opened a research lab in Singapore where it will work on a software platform for delivering cloud-based computing services to enterprises, the company said Wednesday.
The platform, called Cirious, will provide a way for service providers such as Vodafone and Verizon Business to offer hosted computing services that are secure and scalable enough for large corporate customers, said Prith Banerjee, HP senior vice president for research and the director of HP Labs worldwide.
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Cirious will include the ability for customers to move workloads outside their corporate firewalls and into a service provider's data center when the customer needs additional computing capacity, he said. Therefore, one focus of the research will be security.
"By design, you're requiring enterprises to go from within the enterprise to outside the firewall. The particular issue of providing security within this mixed hybrid environment is very complex, and that's what this research is about," Banerjee told reporters during a briefing last week.
Like other cloud platforms, Cirious will use virtualization extensively so that applications are untied from physical hardware and can be moved between servers -- and between data centers -- more freely. It is an architecture that is also being advanced by VMware and other vendors.
In a follow-up e-mail, HP declined to say whether Cirious will be based on an existing hypervisor or use new virtualization technologies. Banerjee said it will use "virtual cells" that extend to all parts of the infrastructure.
"We create a virtual abstraction layer, essentially running computations on processor cells, memory cells, networking cells and storage cells. And we provide that encapsulation in such a secure manner that you, as the end-user, don't have to worry about the security. That is the key secret sauce," he said.
Cirious will allow service providers to offer infrastructure services, akin to Amazon.com's EC2, and on-demand applications, like those from Salesforce.com. They could be general-purpose or tailored for industries such as health care, entertainment and telecommunications, Banerjee said.
Service providers will be able to "develop, host and manage their services to deliver value from the cloud and to integrate with an ecosystem of services from other providers," he said.
Several questions remain, such as when Cirious will be ready for market, and to what extent it will use existing management and virtualization software from HP and other vendors.
Cirious may compete with products from VMware, which has been pitching its new vSphere software as a way to link public and private data centers, and which says it has already signed up more than 1,000 service providers, including AT&T and Verizon Business, to offer cloud services based on its software.
The Xen.org project announced a similar service-provider initiative last August, and HP was listed as one of its supporters.
Industry analyst Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting Group said Cirious might not be tied to one virtualization platform. "I would expect them to support whatever it is the service provider wants to use," he said.
