May 22, 2012, Open Source Business Conference, San Francisco—Zorawar Singh from HP described the changes in his company brought about by the advent of open stack and how it affects their cloud businesses. The new ecosystem brings in both hardware and software to make managed cloud services possible.

Open Stack has enabled them to scale and ship cloud services in a converged infrastructure of systems and management tools. One example of this work is their new EcoPod, a data center in a container that includes optimized air flow to minimize the cooling requirements. The open communities have enabled great increase in innovation and changes in the pace of development.

The social and other media are driving the need for more integration and for the public and private clouds to work well together. Hybrid delivery means that the solutions have to work across al the data centers in both the private and public clouds. Managed cloud services have to address the different business models in the various sectors.

A private cloud has to be considered a cloud in a box and the capital expenses are the key drivers. Systems in a IasS managed format need to have lower operating costs than the alternatives. Public clouds need to have good scalability and security to handle the volume of edge connections.

For all of these systems, the core infrastructure, apps, and information optimizations have to offer choices and the ability to configure the system to consistently handle any level of traffic. The most common architecture is an open architecture, and the common features allow data deliveries across all use models.

The new trends of BYOD are stressing traditional systems. To ease the transitions to a standard environment, front end functions are now written in HTML 5 to service the cloud back end. Riding on top of the hardware and software are analytics and big data management tools. The architecture has to be integrated to be back compatible with the existing enterprise and legacy tools.

HP cloud services on open stack add a stack above the storage, compute, transport levels to provide PaaS, SaaS and services that include workload hosting in a scalable and secure environment. The systems are designed for hybrid interoperability on an IaaS platform. Open stack enables private and public clouds to co-exist, even in non-trivial systems comprised of over 10k end points.

The biggest driver for the industry is the ability to innovate and meet a time to market windows. Putting a focus on both public and private clouds requires a company to be active in the open stack community. HP built their cloud services on mostly open source software. They have published a cloud API directory to support users in a command line interface.

The systems are developer-focused to enable continuous development and quality checks. Lifecycle management is through Chef, git, and other open source tools at the data center level. The systems can scale for all types of user lifecycles. Developers can deliver quality apps through their multiple language support and Rest APIs. The systems have a single client-level interface across all platforms and services.

For the costs of integration and deployment, systems have to deliver innovative cloud services to support BYOD-aware databases and analytics to the users. The systems have to provide the user with quality and security to support QoS and SLA requirements.