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If you thought HPE was getting out of the cloud business, I couldn't blame you. In late 2015, HPE gave up on its public OpenStack-based Helion cloud. Then, early this year, all of HPE's OpenStack developers moved over to SUSE. So, was HPE bidding the cloud, and OpenStack in particular, goodbye? Nope.

In Boston this week at OpenStack Summit, HPE released HPE Helion OpenStack 5.0. This release Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based cloud is built on the OpenStack Newton codebase and adheres tightly to application programming interface (API) standards and services. Since OpenStack's open APIs are an important part of why it's popular with so many companies, that's no small matter.

In particular, Helion OpenStack 5 is designed to make the private cloud the core to your company's already-in-place hybrid infrastructure. With this private cloud as the foundation of your hybrid plan, you can gain the agility and reliability you need for improved performance, economics, and time-to-market while making the most of your legal data centers, servers, and applications. In short, it's the best of the old and new IT worlds.

Helion OpenStack 5.0 features an update to OpenStack Newton. It's designed for greater scalability and resiliency, as well as to support a broader variety of workloads. In particular, this includes native container orchestration. HPE enables you to run self-service containers based on Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos.

In addition, new bare metal multi-tenant networking allows multiple users to securely share an OpenStack region. This enables your sysadmins to create a mix of bare metal and virtualized compute nodes within those regions, which can communicate over tenant networks. On top of that, the new Helion includes integration with SUSE Ceph-based object storage.

This new Helion is all built around the first fruits of SUSE picking up HPE's development team. Peter Chadwick, SUSE's director of product management, cloud, and systems management, told me at OpenStack Summit that "SUSE is blending the strengths -- HPE lifecycle and scalability, SUSE initial setup -- into a best of breed OpenStack distribution."

So where does HPE come in? Well, let me ask you. Does the very idea of installing and maintaining OpenStack give you the heebie-jeebies? This is where HPE wants to help you, and its own bottom-line with HPE Pointnext.

This is HPE's newly redefined services organization. It combines HPE's consulting and support services. The new organization includes 25,000 experts across a broad domain of technologies, with the aggregated knowledge to deliver more than 11,000 successful digital transformation engagements per year.

The new HPE Helion OpenStack will be generally available this summer. HPE product marketing manager Brian Besand blogged, "HPE remains committed to OpenStack, and we have the solutions and expertise to help you transform the way you deliver IT services." I believe him and HPE.

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