Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ) launched into the cloud this week with the announcement of an enterprise cloud service that competes with the likes of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Boasting an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent, HP Enterpise Cloud Services-Compute will initially be offered from two HP data centers located in Tulsa, Okla., and Wynyard, England. HP says that its service level agreement includes a recovery time objective of one hour for a virtual machine, and seven hours for a physical server.

Customers looking to host mission-critical applications will have the option of provisioning their own bare-metal servers through HP ECS-Compute, where they can also buy their own virtualized Windows or Linux instances. "HP is now a full cloud services provider," said Patrick Harr, VP of strategy and solutions for the company's enterprise business, underscoring the company's aggressive move into the cloud space.

Customers who prefer to run things in-house can consider HP CloudSystems, which is a hardware package bundled together with cloud-automation software for enterprises to deploy an on-premise private cloud. In a prepared statement, Ann Livermore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Business wrote: "HP has the enterprise experience, breadth of portfolio and global service delivery organization to lead our clients through this transformation."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Virtualization Review

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