March 17th, 2008

HP launches data center as a service; The cloud meets outsourcing

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 4:01 am

Categories: General, IT Management, Hardware Infrastructure, Outsourcing, Datacenter, SaaS, Hewlett-Packard, Cloud computing

Tags: Data Center, Hewlett-Packard Co., Outsourcing, Service, HP, HP, Larry Dignan

Hewlett-Packard on Monday plans to launch an effort to offer data center as a service to large enterprise customers.

The move is notable for the following reasons:

HP is betting that its service will gain traction among customers trying to create one instance of SAP as they migrate to SAP 6.0.

HP calls the effort Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS), but it’s basically a data center you can subscribe to. The service will be powered by HP’s existing data centers. HP has been consolidating its own data centers and plans to cook them down to six when the consolidation is done. U.S. customers will subscribe to HP’s new paired data centers in Atlanta (the one HP CIO Randy Mott runs the business on) and European customers will have a dedicated facility outside of Paris, says Pat Adamiak, vice president of portfolio, marketing and alliances at HP Services.

Also see: Dan Kusnetzky: HP and the next generation data center, Heather Clancy: HP stakes claim in energy-efficiency services, software

Adamiak outlined the four flavors of its data center as a service lineup optimized for various situations a large company would face. Each service configuration, which promises 99.9 percent uptime like Amazon does, has been tested with unnamed customers. Among the services:

Adamiak adds that HP will add more configurations as a service depending on customer demand. The service differs from a traditional data center hosting arrangement where you essentially rent a facility. HP’s model is to sell data center access via subscription.

Where things get sticky is pricing. HP has chosen to offer its data center as a service as an option to its existing outsourcing clients. As a result, there isn’t some magic sheet outlining what the costs are relative to other offerings. I was curious to see how HP stacked up compared to Amazon and a multitude of other vendors. Admittedly it’s an apples and oranges comparison because few are enterprise class, but a spec sheet outlining at least a few scenarios would have been helpful. “It’s hard to quote a simple price,” says Adamiak. “But it’s competitive with external offerings.”

The initial game plan for HP is to target large companies, but eventually the company is likely to move downstream. That means it is likely to bump into the following cast of characters:

Among other notable items in a bevy of HP data center news: