Today, HP made OpenStack available in public beta, announcing general availability of three services to customers: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network; they're available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In September, the Palo Alto, Calif. company started offering the services to a limited number of customers. HP's move can also be viewed as a strengthened commitment to OpenStack itself. Competitor Citrix is going the opposite direction -- last month relinquishing to open source CloudStack code received as part of the acquisition of Cloud.com last year.

Both HP and Citrix were some of the earliest members of OpenStack.


"We will continue to build, integrate and deploy developer-focused features, designed to support a world-class cloud that enables our customers and partners to run and operate web services at scale, on a global basis", HP Cloud Services chief Zorawar Singh says of Thursday's move.

HP Cloud Compute allows IT administrators to deploy virtual servers on demand, while Cloud Object Storage is the company's data storage in the cloud offering. The Cloud Content Delivery Network is HP's service that allows for fast data transfer by caching data on HP and Akamai's servers worldwide. Like Dell and other companies who have made a business out of selling hardware initially, HP too is focusing on the cloud for additional sources of revenue at a much higher profit margin.

Over 40 companies have already announced their support of HP's cloud service initiative, including CloudOpt and Xeround in databases and Panzura, TwinStrata and Zimanda in storage. The company envisions a virtual marketplace of cloud services in the not too distant future where HP customers will be able to access and purchase both its cloud services and partner applications through a single account.

"Any cloud platform is only as good as the ecosystem and solutions it enables", HP marketing director Karen Reynolds says.

If you're wondering if all this action by HP and others is in response to Amazon's growing clout in cloud services, you're probably right. OpenStack is built to be completely independent of Amazon Web Services, and could be considered one of the true alternatives to Amazon's offering. Citrix in its move to open source CloudStack is touting its AWS support, which has rankled some industry watchers.

"AWS APIs are fine… for Amazon", Sam Johnston, Director, Cloud & IT Services at Equinix tweeted last month. Johnston may be right: supporting AWS may be akin to handing over the keys to a sector that is sure to play a huge role in computing over the next decade.

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