ARM-Powered Cloud Open For Test, Development Via TryStack

The OpenStack cloud community on Wednesday said several of its members have collaborated to make an ARM server-based cloud available for free test deployments.

That cloud is available through TryStack, which is a free site for testing applications designed using the OpenStack cloud. However, TryStack does not allow production runs of cloud applications.

The move to make ARM-based servers available in a test cloud stems from work from several vendors in the OpenStack community, including server vendors Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ), Ubuntu developer Canonical, and Core NAP, an Austin, Texas-based provider of hosted data center services.

HP Pledges 99.95 Percent Uptime To Lure Cloud Customers

Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) is gearing up to launch the first two offerings in its Cloud Services portfolio, and the company is dangling an aggressive service-level agreement to attract customers.

HP's Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network services, currently in public beta, will be generally available Aug. 1, said Gavin Pratt, senior product manager on HP's Cloud Services team, in a Wednesday blog post.

Cloud Object Storage handles archiving and backup, storage of large data sets, and the serving of static content for Web apps. Cloud CDN, powered by Akamai, uses cached and distributed servers to improve performance of Cloud Object Storage.

Cloud Object Storage was one of the two services HP unveiled last September when it debuted its Cloud Services portfolio. The other, HP Cloud Compute, lets customers purchase compute instances on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it is still in public beta.

VMware CEO Maritz Says No Spin-Off Of Cloud, Big Data Assets

The rumored spin-off of VMware's Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service and big data analytics assets from EMC (NYSE:EMC) Greenplum is not happening, at least for the foreseeable future.

"We have no specific plans [for a spin-off] at this point in time," outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz said Monday when asked about the spin-off speculation in a Q&A during VMware's fiscal second quarter earnings call.

In fact, VMware will look to step up its spending on cloud technologies and be more strategic about utilizing those it has already developed, according to Maritz.

"We see the cloud investments we have made as being absolutely critical, and we intend to make further investments going forward," Maritz said on the call. "We are thinking about how to use those assets even more effectively in the future."