HP engineering veep spills cloud plans onto LinkedIn

Ruby, Java, open source, Microsoft Azure

HP is building a wide range of public cloud services, including Amazon-like "infrastructure clouds" offering instant access to readily scalable processing power, storage, and networking resources as well as a "development cloud" for building, hosting, and scaling applications based on Java, Ruby, and other open source languages.

Scott McClellan, the chief technologist and interim vice president of engineering for HP's new cloud services business, laid out the company's plans on his public LinkedIn profile. Prior to McClellan updating his profile, HP had merely said it would eventually offer both an "infrastructure-as-a-service" (IaaS) cloud and "platform-as-a-service" (PaaS) cloud, aka a development cloud.

An HP spokesman declined to comment on the information in McClellan's profile, and the info has now been removed.

According to a person familiar with the matter, who wished to remain anonymous, HP intends to reveal the specifics of its cloud strategy at VMware's VMworld conference in August. This could indicate that HP's technology will in some way use VMware technology. The HP spokesman also declined to comment on the company's plans for VMworld.

Excerpt, Scott McClellan Linkedin Profile

Speaking this March, at an event in San Francisco, HP CEO Leo Apotheker spoke in broad terms about the company's cloud plans. But he did not provide specifics when questioned by The Register.

Last year, Microsoft announced that HP would join Dell and Fujitsu in offering platform clouds based on appliances that mimic Redmond's Windows Azure, but Apotheker would not say if HP was still planning an Azure-based service.

There was no mention of Azure on McClellan's LinkedIn profile. Nor was there mention of .Net or C#, the development platform and accompanying programming language that dovetail so closely with Azure. When discussing development tools, McClellan only mentioned Java, Ruby, and "other open source languages".

"Website and User/Developer Experience," the profile read. "Future HP 'cloud' website including the public content and authenticated user content. APIs and language bindings for Java, Ruby, and other open source languages. Fully functional GUI and CLI [command line interace] (both Linux/Unix and Windows)."

McClellan also discussed several raw infrastructure services, including “compute”, “networking”, "object store", and “block storage”. The latter likely refers to something similar to Amazon's Elastic Block Storage service, which lets you create storage volumes that can be moved between virtual server instances on the company's main "compute" service, known as Elastic Compute Cloud.

The profile specifically said that HP's object store service – likely similar to Amazon's Simple Store Service – will be "built from scratch". It did not use the same language with the compute, networking, and block storage pieces. "An innovative and highly differentiated approach to “cloud computing” – a declarative/model-based approach where users provide a specification and the system automates deployment and management," McClellan said, referring to the trio.

McClellan also referred to "common/shared services" that will apparently span the company's various clouds. These involve user management, key management, identity management and federation, authentication, authorization, auditing billing and metering, alerting and logging, and analytics, according to the profile.

HP rival Dell is also building is own public cloud services. Like HP, the Texas company is coy about its plans, but it appears to be planning an Azure platform cloud and an infrastructure based on OpenStack, the open source build-your-own-cloud project founded by Rackspace and NASA. OpenStack includes platform for both compute and object storage services. ®