HP opens 'private' Cloud beta party for limited numbers

Velvet rope briefly unhooked

Hewlett Packard is inviting developers to a private beta party for its HP Cloud Services from today.

The beta program is on offer so people can test HP's initial cloud services: HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. The first of these lets you "deploy compute instances on demand", while the latter gives you scalable online storage for all kinds of data.

Those who are interested in seeing the service in action can register at www.hpcloud.com, but the PC maker is only taking on a limited, non-specified number of applicants.

"Our goal is to provide the next generation of cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, and businesses of all sizes. We recognise that public cloud services should be open and transparent from end-to-end across APIs, infrastructure and software stack," HP said on its cloud blog. ®