HP’s Cloudstart said to speed private cloud deployment

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled CloudStart, a package that includes hardware, software, and consulting services and aims to speed up the construction of private clouds, it said on Monday.

CloudStart is offered by HP Cloud Consulting Services and will use the company’s Cloud Service Automation tools, which helps enterprises with their cloud installations and provides automation tools to manage cloud-based applications, according to HP. CloudStart will also use its storage and blade servers, HP said in a statement.

HP CloudStart should allow an enterprise to build a private cloud in 30 days, the company said.

Clouds can be rolled out in a number of different ways: using a cloud service provider like Amazon, building one internally, or using a mixture of the two. The latter is usually called a hybrid cloud.

Last week, HP acquired Stratavia, a vendor of management tools that can help IT departments handle hybrid clouds in an effective manner, it said.

The most natural evolution from a traditional data center to the cloud is to first optimize applications for a private cloud, and then move to a hybrid environment in the future, according HP.

The CloudStart package is available in Asia-Pacific and Japan now, and is expected to be available in the rest of the world in December, according to HP, which didn’t provide any pricing information.