
Ubuntu will power HP's new cloud service - diogenescynic
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/ubuntu-will-power-hps-new-cloud-service.ars
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forgotAgain
Who in their right mind would trust HP as a cloud provider? Three CEO's in the
past year. Each one completely different from the last. Can any customer have
confidence that the HP cloud strategy will A) last beyond the current CEO and
B) be better implemented than other recent product strategies?

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nl
HP never burn their customers, especially enterprise customers. Even if they
got out of the hardware business I'd have a lot of confidence that all my HP
hardware would continue to be supported (after all - who ever bought that
business is liable for support, and is really buying the business for the
existing business relationships)

I might be unpopular for saying it, but WebOS was never a great fit for HP,
and they did the right thing to kill it before they ended up in a situation
where they had to support an unpopular platform. Maybe they should have spun
it off, but keeping it as a HP platform didn't make sense.

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3am
It would be more accurate to say that OpenStack is powering HP's new cloud
service. OpenStack has been adopted as the new UEC, and from my experience the
development, documentation, and testing is almost completely geared towards
Ubuntu hosts with KVM backends. So it should be no surprise that a commercial
OpenStack deployment is going to based on the standard and best supported
configuration.

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gunz_rozez
Its nice to see OpenStack getting picked up by HP, I think that is the bigger
story here....wonder why they would choose Ubuntu over HPUX....It should not
be that difficult to port HPUX onto OpenStack. Also would like to see if HP's
play here would be get enterprises on this new "Cloud" they are building.

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bad_user
Probably because HP-UX is a technical liability that they are keeping around
just for the support contracts involved.

The hard reality is that while these operating systems (like HP-UX or Solaris)
may still have some technical or commercial advantages, what really matters
when you want to scale is the predictability and support for all kinds of
cheap/expensive/old/new hardware and the availability of up-to-date software
packages, and you really can't beat Linux there.

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nl
The big story here is the use of KVM.

KVM is mostly seen as a RedHat technology these days in the Enterprise,
because RedHat provides most of the support for customers. I suspect in this
case HP have built the expertise in-house.

The KVM people will be pleased to see this endorsement because most large
public clouds (eg Amazon and Rackspace) are on Xen, and VMWare dominates the
enterprise. KVM seems to have been stuck in the middle a little bit - used in
a few enterprises, but not as many "name brands" as VMWare, and used in a few
hosting providers, but none as big as Amazon and Rackspace.

They have had other wins (I think Oracle's enterprise virtulization is KVM
based (not VirtualBox)) and I think IBM and Dell use it too. But none of them
run public clouds.

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soapdog
not too familiar with cloud software, can someone point to a reference on why
use openstack instead of Xen and VMWare stuff. I am not bashing openstack, I
am trying to educate myself here...

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rjbond3rd
Just curious, what can Ubuntu Server provide as a cloud OS that isn't already
in Debian? Is it just the Canonical support?

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serverascode
I don't know if I would use it but I hope they contribute back to the
community.

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inopinatus
Come back Tru64 Unix, all is forgiven.

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suivix
What happened to HP-UX?

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wmf
HP-UX doesn't run on x86 and the cloud == x86.

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gunz_rozez
But if they can port it to the Itanium instruction set then why not x86?

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wmf
But who wants that? Aside from strategic reasons, why would it be better than
Linux/KVM?

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Apocryphon
Whither WebOS?

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tesseract
WebOS isn't a server OS, it's a Linux userland for touch-based mobile devices.

