For Stackers in the Seattle, Washington area, Joe Heck will talk about the OpenStack^™ Keystone project at this week’s OpenStack meetup in Seattle, Washington.  Hosted by HP, the event will take place on Thursday, May 24 at 7:00pm at One Convention Place, 701 Pike Street, Suite 1100 in Seattle, Washington. If you’d like to register, there still might be a chance to get in through the waitlist.  

If you’ll be at the meetup, take the opportunity to ask the HP Cloud team about the HP Cloud Identity Service, which is built on a foundation of OpenStack Keystone capabilities.  In case you didn’t see the prior posts, information is available on this blog introducing the HP Cloud Identity Service and about using the HP Cloud Identity Service. 

HP Cloud Identity Service provides a single method for managing user identities and authenticating each user’s access to resources across all HP Cloud Services. This means you don’t have to worry about managing different credentials for each service or authenticating your access to resources via unique endpoints. Through HP Cloud Identity Service, you get a consistent, foundational set of capabilities that you can rely on for identity management and authentication.

The OpenStack™ Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of OpenStack, LLC, in the United States and other countries and are used with OpenStack LLC's permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by OpenStack LLC, the OpenStack Advisory Board, or the OpenStack community.

HP BookPrep makes more than a million books available on the HP Cloud

Four years ago, Prakash Reddy had an intriguing technology challenge in HP Labs. The concept was to minimize the pain of converting scanned book content to Print-On-Demand (POD) books – taking scans, applying technology from HP Labs, and creating a solution so that books could be made available on demand. Because it was tough to know the demand for printed books in advance, enabling on demand printing seemed like a good solution. Today, HP BookPrep offers more than a million (and growing) books that you can read for free online or print on demand.

The million plus books that HP BookPrep makes available for reading (for free) online are stored in HP Cloud Object Storage. In other words, when you read an HP BookPrep book online, every page click goes to HP Cloud Object Storage to retrieve the next page in the book. Also, a growing number of books are processed with HP Cloud Compute, which currently supplies 20% of the compute power needed for HP BookPrep’s book processing efforts.

Prakash says that HP BookPrep achieved two things by moving to HP Cloud infrastructure - speed and reliability, and the decision to switch to HP cloud was a no-brainer.

Most of the books available through HP BookPrep are tough to get from any other source. Some of the books are over 100 years old, and most of the books are out of copyright and out of print.  HP BookPrep can bring any book, no matter when or how it was originally printed, back into print.

Read more...

Open source’s influence continues to grow – and accelerate. Next week’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012 is a place where you can connect with the developers, users, and the companies driving open source, mobile, and cloud technology.  OSBC 2012  is happening May 21 – 22 in San Francisco, CA.  

Zorawar 'Biri' Singh, SVP & GM, HP Cloud Cloud Services

On Tuesday, May 22, at 10:05am, Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, SVP and GM, HP Cloud Services will present a keynote, “Building the Future: Open Source Cloud Computing and How It Is Transforming Business.” Open and collaborative design and development of Cloud systems though projects such as the OpenStack^TM project create and accelerate innovation. Biri’s talk will show how Hewlett-Packard is transforming its Cloud businesses based on open source community projects and the vibrant ecosystems around them. Biri will share lessons learned by massively scaling and rapidly delivering a public cloud service offering to market - and HP’s vision for the Converged Cloud. 

Monday, May 21 from 12:30 to 2:00, Eileen Evans, Vice President, Open Source Strategy and Intellectual Property, HP  will lead a lunchtime Birds of a Feather Discussion. Scott Shaffer, Director of Platform Virtualization, will speak on a panel, “Virtualization for the 99%: Is KVM Set to Occupy the Data Center?,” on Monday, May 21, at 3:00pm. Eileen Evans and Nissa Strottman, Senior Counsel, Intellectual Property Transactions, HP will speak on “Cloud Computing and the Law” on Tuesday, May 22 at 3:00pm.   

Come find out more about how you can get your cloud, your way - and open source. If you haven’t yet, there’s still time to register for OSBC 2012.

The OpenStack™ Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of OpenStack, LLC, in the United States and other countries and are used with OpenStack LLC's permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by OpenStack LLC, the OpenStack Advisory Board, or the OpenStack community.

Cloud infrastructure is just the beginning. While HP Cloud Services works to add additional core service offerings on top of IaaS, the HP Cloud Services’ partner ecosystem is growing rapidly and provides users a rich set of functionality. As of May 10, 2012, the first day of public beta, a variety of solutions from nearly 40 companies are available and ready to use with HP Cloud Services, and more partner solutions will be added in the coming weeks and months.

Through our partner community, you can access solutions from storage systems to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to mobile development to cloud management to testing to monitoring tools and more. 

Here’s a quick overview of the value you can get from our partners.

Read more...

Jon Paul Sullivan, HP Cloud Services

Chef, an open source project built to automate the cloud, is the systems integration framework that has been most widely adopted by the OpenStack^™ community. Chef lets you deploy servers, get them into the state you want, and scale applications. It marries configuration management and service-oriented architectures with the power of Ruby so you can create elegant, fully automated infrastructure. You can also break Chef down to Ruby, the primary language used for automation in OpenStack. 

For those who want to know more about Chef, ChefConf 2012, happening in San Francisco, CA from May 15 to May 17, should help you get your recipes and cookbooks ready for business in the cloud.

ChefConf 2012 will be Opscode’s inaugural user conference. HP Cloud Services’ Jon Paul Sullivan will present “Concentrated Awesome: Building the HP Cloud” on Wednesday, May 16 at 10:30am on the Main Stage: Salon A-E. 

Jon Paul is a Software Engineer with HP Cloud Services based in Galway, Ireland.  For the past 11 years, he has been involved in creating scale-out products for the high performance computing industry.  Before being involved in creating the ultimate scale-out product – hpcloud – Jon Paul has written software to deploy and administer products autonomously.  He is now guiding Chef usage throughout the hpcloud infrastructure group.

Jon Paul’s talk will introduce hpcloud, show the problems solved by Chef, and share some of hpcloud’s planned next steps in the areas where Chef contributes. HP Cloud uses Chef for fleet management – security patching, for instance, and uses Chef for rolling updates to enable service uptime during deployments of new code.

Cloud infrastructure automation enables efficient scaling, as without automation, you have to scale people in order to scale your infrastructure. And automation tools enable a number of functions needed specifically in the context of public cloud environments, which are multi-tenant, with globally distributed customers, and need to support intra-data center high availability with multiple availability zones.  The combination of automation tools and the continuous technical operations and development operations processes that are enabled by automation tools means that any problem a customer may encounter will be fixed right away.

As Opscode is a member of the HP Cloud Services partner ecosystem, Chef is also directly available to HP Cloud Services customers via Opscode’s HP Cloud Services plugin. You can work directly from the command line to create, bootstrap, and manage HP Cloud instances. You assign new servers a role, and Chef takes care of the rest: packages are installed, files are written and each new server is delivered as a cohesive portion of a fully-automated infrastructure. You can consume Chef in three ways: open source Chef, Private Chef, and the Hosted Chef SaaS platform.

An open source project, Chef has more than 600 individual contributors, 120 corporate contributors and thousands of companies using Chef for infrastructure automation.

On behalf of your HP Cloud Services team, welcome to the HP Cloud Public Beta.

Today’s fast-evolving mobile & cloud economy is mandating developers have choice in the tools they use. At HP, we believe the currency of the day is simply ‘time to code.’

We’re learning a great deal from our beta users, and have reached an important milestone on our journey toward delivering an open, scalable, secure enterprise-grade public cloud.  Thank you for your participation and support.

Any cloud platform is only as good as the eco-system and solutions it enables.  We want to thank all of our great partners and recognize their compelling solutions - from storage and management to database and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Our solutions today are the foundation of our HP Cloud Services Marketplace.

It’s why we’re building an open and secure public cloud infrastructure with the very best of HP, OpenStack™ technology at the core and developer-friendly features, so you can build, run and operate web services at scale on a global basis.  We have a lot more in store.

Today, we just want to say thank you for joining us on our journey. We hope to earn your trust and business every day.  Keep the feedback coming, we’re listening.

-       your HP Cloud Services Team!

Gavin Pratt, Sr. Product Manager, HP Cloud Services

I’m excited to announce the launch of HP Cloud Block Storage into private beta.  With this new service, you can now add additional storage volumes of any size (up to 2TB per volume, with multiple volumes allowed) to your HP Cloud Compute instances.  Additionally, this data persists independent of your compute instances, so even if you delete a VM, your volumes and your data will remain in your account.  You can also snapshot your volume to create a point-in-time copy. New volumes can then be created from these snapshots.  These volume snapshots can also be backed up to HP Cloud Object Storage for further protection.  Backup is currently a manual process, and we will be delivering an API service to help automate this in the future.

What makes HP Cloud Block Storage so special?

HP Cloud Block Storage is exciting for a number of reasons:

• First, the service (running on HP hardware) is designed to be highly available.  Using RAID, along with other high availability techniques, your data will be preserved even if an entire hard disk or RAID controller fails. 
• Second, the system is designed for high performance.  Try it out; I think you’ll like what you find, and we’re continually working to make it even better. 
• Third, HP Cloud Block Storage was built upon and is compatible with OpenStack’s^™ open-source Nova-Volume driver.  As such, it can be accessed via  OpenStack’s standard Nova API calls and CLI.

Is HP Cloud Block Storage right for you?

HP Cloud Block Storage is ideal for when you need to add additional capacity to your compute instances, and/or you want to ensure the data from your compute instances persists independent of the life of a specific VM.  Additionally, it’s perfect for applications & databases where you need to perform reads & writes concurrently with high IOPS performance.

If you’re using this storage primarily for data archiving or serving static content via the web, however, HP Cloud Object Storage may be the best choice for those use cases.  A detailed description of the different types of storage available at HP Cloud Services is listed below.

Read more...

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), taking place May 7 through May 11 at the Oakland Marriott City Center in Oakland, CA, is where you can contribute to planning the next version of Ubuntu. Canonical engineers, community members, partners, upstreams, and cloud developers will all be there. Bdale Garbee, HP’s Chief Technologist For Linux & Open Source, will be giving a keynote, “HP and Ubuntu: Paving the Way to a Bright Future Together,” on Monday, May 7at 2:00pm in the main plenary room, Hall East.

Read more . . .

Interop is a conference steeped in the latest cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobility, and data center advances, where attendees are inspired  to invent and build business, without limits.

If you’ll be at the Expo, come to the HP booth #1327 and find out how to get your cloud, your way –backed by HP, OpenStack^™ technology, and HP Cloud Services’ partners. Product demos in the booth will show you how you can run and operate web services at scale leveraging  HP’s public cloud.