HP’s 13.5 Public Cloud Release Underwhelms
HP recently made headlines in the news for partnering up with SalesForce on a new cloud product, however HP’s most recent update to their public cloud offering is causing some cloud analysts and businesses to jeer. The 13.5 release of HP’s public cloud was supposed to offer “Lots of great new features,” according to a blog post on HP’s website. The public seems underwhelmed with this release because functionality seems to have been crippled.
One of the biggest complaints among system administrators is the lack of support for Amazon EC2 APIs and the private cloud toolset called Eucalyptus. HP is quoted as saying, “The EC2 API and Euca-tools are not supported in this release.” Since Amazon AWS has become synonymous with the public cloud, its APIs were held in high regard by systems operations analysts all across the world. The dropped support for Eucalyptus was also a surprise to the Eucalyptus chief Marten Mickos who indicated he was unaware of the change ahead of time.
A number of other issues are being reported with this release. If you are trying to utilize the new high-memory features promised in this release, you may get this error message: “Windows instances booted using the highmem flavor are unusable.” Another error being reported by HP is this one that relates to creating simultaneous instances. The error says, “If you attempt to simultaneously launch a large number of instances, some instances might not be ping-able or accessible via ssh. HP recommends staggering your launch of multiple instances to batches of at most 100 at a time for the best performance.”
Other problems are being reported in regards to image snapshots and storage volume errors. Many users of the service are reporting that the new update has created more problems than it has fixed and it seems like the new update had good intentions but the error messages seem to indicate otherwise.
