HP cloudy bigwig: the Helion train is steaming ahead

A "full blown" commercial release of HP's Helion enterprise edition should hit the market in the dead of summer - a little later than expected - priced at $1,400 a year per server.

The free Open Stack community edition was launched on 7 May and Kerry Bailey, senior veep for HP Cloud, said it has had over 1,000 downloads allowing those enterprises to build their own fluffy white service.

Details of the paid-for version, initially planned for release in June, were rolled out today at Discover in Las Vegas, and as expected it comes with more features to justify the price tag.

"What do we do differently between these two [is a] much higher level of security, thorough code reviews, we make sure the code is enterprise class, tested across the board," said Bailey.

He told El Chan "manageability" is also greater giving enterprises plug-ins to control the services from their current systems and auto scale, "it is upgradable with releases every six weeks".

"It has high availability and certainly scales across 40,000 VMs," the cloudy boss claimed.

The price at $1,400 a server per year is "extremely aggressive" and when a customer comes with a requirement for thousands of nodes, "we will look at discounting that appropriately.

"We don't have a discounting piece that we'll publish, but we've got customers talking about coming in right now at tens and twenties of thousands of nodes," he said.

The commercial edition is out in preview mode, a test bed allowing partners to work with customers but "in a few months you'll see the full blow commercial model come out".

"The Helion train in running, extremely aggressively," said Bailey.

He said HP has engaged service providers and channel partners so they can take Helion, and "wrap their services around it". ®