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HP To Shut Down Its OpenStack Based Public Cloud (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016. in a buzzword-laden blog post, the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public cloud offerings to provide options for customers who require such functionality. "HP’s decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the company’s public cloud ambitions. It has become increasingly clear that there are three, maybe four companies that can support (at scale) the massive shared computing, networking, and storage infrastructure necessary for a public cloud. ... HP will continue pushing its private and hybrid cloud."
HP has been in decline for years.
Quality is down. Innovation is down. A series of seemingly incompetent CEOs. A couple of bad purchases. Some stupid decisions. Some utterly failed products.
Like so many large companies, now they mostly just lurch from one thing to another hoping sooner or later one of them sticks. One gets the distinct impression nobody really has a clue of what they're doing, and even less of a clue about what to do about it.
Welcome to the modern world of tech, where you buy everything in sight, fuck it up, have a bunch of bad management, and then eventually implode as you realize nobody in your organization measures up to the people who got you there.
One wonders how many good companies have been swallowed up and ruined in trying to make huge companies more profitable, only to find out the huge companies have no idea what they're doing.
Over and over again, we see big corporations who really just keep changing CEOs, and utterly failing to understand just how badly they're all screwing up the company.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As a brand, HP means nothing more to people anymore than "some company that makes printers."
For it to thrive for the next 20 years, what HP should do is:
1) Get some consumer/business cred (and market share) back by selling "the longest lasting print cartridges"
2) Buy up the 3d printer market and develop a brand that builds on "InkJet" and "LaserJet" like "3DJet"
I determined NOT to ever again buy anything from HP when the company refused to upgrade its driver to a newer Windows operating system for an HP printer I had purchased from HP. That printer immediately became a piece of unusable junk on my new computer.
And I will never vote for anyone who has ever had anything to do with HP.
All the cloud companies might be generally evil (looking your way, MS & Amazon) but they generally have their shit together. HP is that company that used to make printers, nobody's going to trust them with mission critical shit. Yes they have some high end niche stuff which is cool, but for the 99% of people who want Cloud, they don't care.
we break them before we make them? phewww.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfPA9LbqDEE
They used HP hardware to build their own cloud because it was cheaper.
Then they found out they needed to buy separate ILOM cards so they could manage their hardware. So much for cheaper.
They spent hundreds of man-hours installing the ILOM cards.
Then they found out they needed to by licenses for the ILOM software. Oh crap, now it's more expensive.
Then the servers went operational and they found out their brand-fucking-new HP servers are actually SLOWER than the years-old Sun Microsystems-built x86 servers they're supposed to replace - because HP used cheap parts like motherboards with no memory bandwidth and complete piece-of-shit commodity disk controllers that shit the bed when trying to move more than 50MB/sec. Oh yeah, the NEW HP servers only have two gigE ports - whereas the OLD Sun servers had FOUR. And if they had used new Oracle-built servers from the old Sun production line, they would have gotten four 10GB network ports on FASTER servers - and had remote management hardware with fully licensed software for LESS money. (And Oracle ain't exactly cheap, so when the final solution from HP is shittier and more expensive than the one from Oracle...)
Then the damn HP hardware started failing right and left. And the cheap-ass fiber-channel HBAs don't work with a damn.
Can you tell I've dealt with HP before?
So it's not surprising the HP can't deal with HP either.
HP will be the poster child for what happens when MBAs and H1Bs take over a company.
Ultimately, tech companies need to be run by tech visionaries. Car companies need to be run by car guys/gals. Financial companies need to be run by sharks.
You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation. Creativity and passion can not be taught.
I miss the old HP, run by passionate engineers, that built the worlds best calculators, printers, and oscilloscopes.
At this late stage, trying to catch up to AWS or Azure would be a death march. They should try something with better odds, say, invading Russia during the winter.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Conventional wisdom is that a mature industry can only support three big players, with the top dog making most of the profits, but the cloud is more of a utility than an industry. HP should buy Rackspace and use it to help bolster their private cloud pitch - you can migrate data between your own data centers and Rackspace, either for seasonal spike loads or on a batch basis.
built strategy idea hybrid infrastructure future. committed helping customers seamlessly manage business managed public cloud environments, optimize infrastructure unique requirements.
market hybrid infrastructure evolving. customers consistently meet full spectrum, hybrid combination efficiently managed cloud, access public cloud capabilities certain workloads. pushing delivery solutions.
customer needs, decision double-down managed cloud capabilities. cloud-enabling solutions, innovate invest OpenStack® platform. OpenStack® strong customer adoption industry leading private cloud solution, CloudSystem, continues deliver strong double-digit revenue growth win enterprise customers. cloud services, focus resources Managed and Virtual Private Cloud offerings. offerings continue expand, very exciting announcements these fronts coming weeks.
Public cloud important customers’ hybrid cloud strategy, customers cloud manifestations blurring. Customer ability bring together multiple cloud environments flexible enterprise-grade hybrid cloud model. deliver best-of-breed public cloud offerings, move to strategic, multiple partner-based model public cloud capabilities, component deliver hybrid cloud solutions enterprise customers.
sunset Public Cloud offering. help customers, build run best cloud environments suited needs - workloads business industry requirements.
support new model, continue aggressively grow partner ecosystem integrate public cloud environments. enable flexibility, helping customers build cloud-portable applications OpenStack® Development Platform. leading Cloud28+ initiative bringing commercial public sector vendors develop common cloud service offerings.
customers access large-scale public cloud providers, greater support hybrid delivery, support customers run platform – private clouds, managed cloud, large-scale public cloud.
key elements helping customers transform hybrid, multi-cloud IT world. continue innovate grow areas of strength, continue help partners help develop broader open cloud ecosystem, continue listen customers understand entire end-to-end strategies.
sauce: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Grounded-in-the-Cloud/A-new-model-to-deliver-public-cloud/ba-p/6804409#.VifygVPF_nS
HP is a pathetic company that only saves itself by firing thousands of employee's. I will never buy another HP product again! I cannot even name one product HP does well. They always skimp on something in hardware that makes the product really problematic. Their focus has been on cutesy designs and even their professional line has no significant advantage over a Dell or Lenovo in durability or support. I think the only reason enterprise bought into HP was that HP under cut everyone else to win bids and its why they are in the trouble they are. They sold a ton of PC's and printers but have little to show for it. How can you be 1 or 2 PC maker and have dismal profits?
I work for a fairly large service provider, we've been trying to be successful at deploying a full public cloud based on OpenStack for a long time now (years). Today, OpenStack is put together by a fairly large amount of private cloud folks. It's a very nice offering if you want to run a private cloud -- even a very large one, but running a public cloud is different. You have to think about multi-tenancy -- scaling in the number of different segregated users using the cloud not just the number of nodes in the system, you have to think about no down time deployments and migrations, etc. OpenStack is just not focused on this -- and there have been a lot of design decisions that make running a public cloud a pain. We've tried multiple times to submit patches that would enable public -- but there is a lot of bureaucracy and control by private cloud companies that most of those patches fail to make master. Thanks to DefCore [https://github.com/openstack/defcore/blob/master/doc/source/process/CoreDefinition.rst] if we introduce our own patches that fork core in any way -- even for our own deployments -- we risk losing the OpenStack trade mark. So it's very difficult, we haven't given up on OpenStack public cloud..yet...but it's frustrating.
"Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public butt plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public butt in January 2016. ... the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public butt offerings ... "HPâ(TM)s decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the companyâ(TM)s public butt ambitions. It has become increasingly clear that there are three, maybe four companies that can support (at scale) the massive shared computing, networking, and storage infrastructure necessary for a public butt. ... HP will continue pushing its private and hybrid butt.""
(Yes, HP is capable of smart moves. Sometimes.)
It isn't a question of whether HP can pull something like this off - it's whether it makes sense to even try. Amazon AWS and Windows Azure are well entrenched in the public cloud market, and currently locked in a pricing death spiral. Have you looked at how cheap storage is in either of these clouds? I basically built myself an Azure filer with massive amounts of space that does personal backups for a few bucks a month and could do the same with Amazon -- cheaper than it would cost to buy a home JBOD box (at least in the short term.) This pricing thing is going to spiral down to near-zero until both vendors have their customers, then they'll slowly be able to turn it up notch by notch as leaving the cloud becomes less of an option. It's the same business model as outsourced IT -- come in cheap, and as the customer becomes more and more helpless without you, add in change orders and increase rates.
Even if it funny-moneys the hardware from one division to another, HP can't compete with Amazon or Microsoft rolling out stadium-sized data centers with cheap disposable whitebox hardware. The best they could hope for is to give away the cloud capacity and add "services" on top. And most IT people are familiar with the former EDS and their ability to "deliver" "services." :-)
I think the hardware vendors would be wise to concentrate on making kick-ass hardware for companies to implement their own private clouds. Our company has customer data that can't live in the cloud, and a potential service-wide outage like the Azure certificate failure last year would mean that our redundancy requirements would make us pay for 2 vendors. In addition, we deploy stuff to locations that don't have cheap abundant Internet connectivity yet. Use cases like this will always exist, but the virtualization benefits (ugh, "cloud") are great for internal use as well.
I think HP is totally messed up and has lost its way, but somehow they still manage to produce a few good products. Their servers are still solid, as well as some of their storage stuff. The problem is that they're like IBM -- cutting their way to growth and playing with financial engineering to make shareholders happy. Both companies need a serious clean-out, and I'm not talking about laying off 30,000 more product engineers and talented people who actually do things. They have the same dead wood and inertia problems any big organization has.
"It’s anything but cloudy in Europe" says the e-mail they just sent out, as HP's executives enjoy a European vacation touting... the "Cloud" the day after they shut down Helion.
Maybe they should have priced Helion's could services competitively and gave it a chance, but right now, the board and CEO don't have a long attention span, nor any long term strategy beyond jacking up the stock prices so they can sell off and make a quick escape.
A public cloud business, regardless of technical ability and capability, just doesn't align with HP's current goals well. It's a thankless low margin business from the start, which is not the sort of thing for HP to 'fix' what investors perceive as their challenges. It's also a good way to piss off potential clients that end up competing, though that's mitigated by HP's complete inability to get any market share.
As far as openstack goes, I'd say it is afflicted by the curse of getting buzz from businesses too early in it's life. Now it's a sort of unholy mess of stuff polluted by a lot of conflicting corporate interests, and no good outlook to redo some of those decisions. Linux is an example of fortunate interaction with business interests. It got established before toxic business interests came along, and so fundamental architecture wasn't so much at the whim of those interests. Also, it is more strongly led, whereas openstack is just a sort of amalgamation of code running largely amok without structured checks and balances (in relative terms, there are worse projects that are pretty ubiquitous too, but not so high profile).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
what this does to their Moonshot product or is that a dead tech by now?
As a tecnology person I have only ever seen HP as a trio of companies. One sells crappy laptops, one sells printers with exploitive prices for ink and toner, and the other has salesmen in cheap but still too slick suits trying to sell services that only make sense to techno-illiterate CEOs and board members. Not once in my life have I heard some respectable IT person put HP on any list of server technologies that they were even looking into, let alone buying.
The same when I used to see any business that had all IBM desktops. I would just laugh and say, "I wonder what the total cost per machine that is going to come to?" You could be certain that those machines were just part of a giant upsell as soon as some IBM saleman got his foot in the door during a golf game with some executives in the sucker company.
So if anyone is put out by this decision to close this technology it just certifies them as a fool.
(1) shut down own public cloud
(2) be a azure+aws reseller
(3) PROFIT!!!
I have no idea how complicated AWS is, but can you honestly provide any value to the customer just managing AWS?
Scott McNeal once compared, x86-retailing to putting "bruises on bananas". These days, it's Rackspace + HP who look they are doing the very same thing in a different market.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Dumping the Compaq crap. Now they need to dump off EDS as services is dying as well (for many companies, not just HP). They are slowly and quietly putting a knife to services as we speak.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Take a good look (if you can stand it) at the final HP death spiral and consider what would likely happen to the United States if Carly Fiorina finagled her way into the Oval Office. This isn't just partisan politics--I'd rather Trump, Jeb, Hillary or Jack the Ripper or Hitler's exhumed corpse than than her.
Large companies are less efficient and innovative than smaller ones. Yet in todays world (and also in much of the past) they can play out their sheer size and gain advantage from that.
Not because of efficiencies of scale, no, those are outweiged easily by overhead and confusion growing like O(exp(company size)).
But by distorting the market, buying smaller companies and stripping/ruining them, and by playing the global finance system, is how todays large corporations manage to stay afloat.
At the cost of numerous others.
But important political systems in the world are directly influenced by money, therefore this system is self-sustaining, to the detriment of many people.