HP and Avnet to roll out Cloud-in-a-Box for software test and development
Software and hardware subscription service ready to reduce system administration costs straight from delivery
HP and Avnet are teaming up to offer a Cloud-in-a-Box service to provide customers with a quick easily implementable software test and development environment.
Avnet plans to offer the hardware and software as a subscription service using HP’s Blade servers, bundled with a range of software to create a preconfigured private cloud system
Both Avnet and HP are keen to enable speed up test and dev, and believe that private cloud use can remove some of the headaches associated with it.
With frequent software release cycles meaning that complex systems have to be provisioned and reconfigured, this is hitting customers in the pocket with increased demands on system administration.
According to the pair, the Cloud-in-a-Box offering will improve system administration productivity by a factor of six, as well as reducing defect outages by 31 percent and reducing problem management time by 41 percent. All in all this should help reduce the time to market for new functionality and applications HP and Avnet say.
At an HP Software Universe event in Marble Arch last week, HP Software UK General Manager Ian Brook said that the whole system can be delivered straight to the customer’s door with everything that is needed to get going.
The subscription model means that customers don’t need to shell out a load on capital expenditure either.
“They can wheel it in, plug it in and start to use it as soon as they need to,” Brook told ChannelBiz.
“We have taken all the configuration out of it, we have taken all of the requirements to actually procure hardware, software, the services to put it in.”
“Working with Avnet is like a breath of fresh air because they can simplify this and say what does the customer need and develop that as a one off product.”
Avnet’s HP Business Leader Scott Murphy says that the Cloud-in-a-Box is a product of the close work between the two firms, and says that further application could be found for the service in future.
“The beauty is that Avnet is not a testing specialist,” he told us. “Our specialisation is packaging something and then enabling the business partners with that package to take it to market.
“We see this as the potential first of many such applications we can deliver to our customers through the same channel.”
The service bundle consists of an HP BladeSystem Matrix server using HP cloud automation software, test management software and a host of third party software applications.
Third party applications include VMware’s vSphere, Windows 2008 Enterprise R2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database Server, and many others.
The hardware configuration includes HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure, five G7 Blades each with 128GB, network switch and ten 146Gb 6Gb/sec SAS Discs.