HP Launches Public Cloud Service

HP is now officially offering its public cloud, HP Cloud Compute, as a pay-as-you-go service. First announced in April of this year, the service was moved from beta to general availability in about seven months.

The company is pitching HP Cloud Compute as a service to store content and big data, host Web sites and apps, and use the public cloud environment as a playground to develop apps. The offering is introduced with a 50 percent discount until January 1 and is available in six performance tiers for Linux and Windows, with a cost ranging from $0.02/hr and $0.64/hr on Linux and from $0.03/hr to $0.96/hr on Windows.

The smallest instances run on one virtual core with one Cloud Compute unit, 1 GB RAM and 30 GB space, while the largest instance provides 32 HP Cloud Compute units via eight virtual cores with four Cloud Compute units each, 32GB RAM, and a 960 GB disk.

Supported operating systems include:

• CentOS 6.2 Server 64 bit
• CentOS 5.6 Server 64 bit
• Debian Squeeze 6.0.3 Server 64 bit
• Fedora 16 Server 64 bit
• Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS Server 64 bit
• Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 Server 64 bit
• Ubuntu Natty 11.04 Server 64 bit
• Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 Server 64 bit
• Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Server 64 bit

as well as

• Windows Server Enterprise Edition 2008 SP2 32 bit
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 64 bit
• Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit

Bandwidth pricing starts at $0.12 per GB for the first 10 GB (1 GB free), down to $0.05 per GB for customers who need more than 150 GB bandwidth per month.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.