HP CSA Vs VMware VCAC

HP Converged Cloud:

HP Converged Cloud is the industry’s first hybrid delivery approach and portfolio based on a common architecture that enables customers to build, manage, secure, and consume cloud services that span private, managed, and public clouds as well as traditional IT.

HP Converged Cloud is based on open standards and supports multivendor, heterogeneous software and hardware. It is built on industry-leading HP Converged Infrastructure,
HP Converged Management and Security, HP Converged Information, and OpenStack technologies. HP has an open cloud! Deploying your application in an open cloud has several advantages:

ü  No vendor lock-in – Standards-based APIs are portable across OpenStack-based public, private, and managed clouds, meaning you can easily move your workloads and applications that were written on top of it, to any other cloud! You will not be able to do so in a proprietary cloud.

ü  Supports hybrid cloud architecture – Deploy applications jointly in your private and public cloud to support compliance, security, public access, cost optimization, time-to-market, etc.  Federated public/private deployments are enabled by open cloud architecture.

ü  Accelerated time-to-market and innovation – With a community of over 180 companies contributing to the OpenStack platform, you can expect faster improvements and a wider breadth of capabilities than a smaller cloud community or proprietary cloud vendor could provide.

ü  Ecosystem of cloud solutions – By adopting the largest open cloud architecture,
HP Cloud has attracted an ecosystem of over 100 solution partners that provide storage, platform, orchestration, security solutions, and end-user applications.

ü  Ease of integration – Open, web-based REST APIs simplify deployment and management of your workload.

Although VMware claims its cloud offering to be open, the core of VMware is based on proprietary VMware virtualization technology!

HP CloudSystem offering:

HP CloudSystem is the most complete, integrated, open platform that enables enterprises and service providers to build and manage cloud services.

Based on proven, market-leading HP Converged Infrastructure and Cloud Service Automation, HP CloudSystem integrates servers, storage, networking, security, and management to automate the infrastructure-to-application lifecycle for hybrid service delivery management. The result is a complete cloud solution that lets enterprises gain agility and speed, and allows service providers to drive top-line growth.

HP CloudSystem has a full range of scalable, extensible offerings to fit any level of cloud maturity.

One platform, three integrated offerings:

This document we will be focused on:

HP CloudSystem Matrix- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for private and hybrid cloud environments, allowing users to provision infrastructure in minutes for physical and virtual.

HP CloudSystem Enterprise - for organizations looking to deploy a full range of service models (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), including advanced application-to-infrastructure lifecycle management.

VMware Cloud offering:

Solution Description:  “Integrated cloud infrastructure solution that integrates VMware’s leading virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU for delivering the software-defined datacenter”.

Offering:  VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, is built from different components of cloud Infrastructure and available in three editions:  Standard, Advanced and Enterprise, each contains different set of components:

There is greater flexibility and choice with HP cloud offering - heterogeneous support included a standard in all of HP offerings, open architecture and no vendor lock in approach (choice of multiple hypervisors, support for OpenStack standards, etc.)

In order to properly compare between HP and VMware offering, we should compare:

1.       HP CloudSystem Matrix VS vCloud Suite Standard/ Advanced
(MOE vs vCloud Director) – for IaaS.

2.       HP CloudSystem Enterprise VS vCloud Suite Enterprise
(MOE & CSA vs vCloud Director & vCAC) – for IaaS + PaaS + Saas.

HP CloudSystem Matrix SW & VMware vCloud Suites Standard/Advanced comparison:

CloudSystem Matrix is based on MOE SW and vCloud Suite Standard/ Advanced are based on vCloud director, both of these solutions provides infrastructure as a service- IaaS.
The MOE has a lot of "out of the box" functionalities which help you deploy services easily, unlike vCloud director which you should create a lot of scripts on your own. It is much more complete solution than vCloud director, for example- the vCloud director doesn’t have a service approval functionality, it doesn’t have physical bare-metal provisioning etc.

Functionality comparison:

Attributes	VMware vCloud Suites Standard/Advanced	HP CloudSystem Matrix
Complete end-to-end, industry leading infrastructure and software solutions (with single source for support)	No. VMware requires VCE Partnership to provide a full solution stack end to end.	Yes. Complete industry leading integrated infrastructure and software solutions including integration with Partner solutions.
Pre-integrated Deployment Templates	Limited.	Yes. Over 200 HP Cloud Maps are available. Cloud Maps are pre-packaged application templates, which enable push-button deployment of customized catalogs of application services such as Oracle, Microsoft SharePoint and SAP NetWeaver. This is a feature unique to HP.
Bursting capability	Limited. vCloud to vCloud bursting only through vCloud Connector.	Yes.  Ability to burst to another private MOE, and to public clouds such as- HP Cloud Services, Amazon EC2, Savvis.
Vendor lock-in approach for hypervisors	Yes. Supports only VMware hypervisor, using VMware ESX/ESXi  hypervisor	No. Supports multiple hypervisors including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and OpenStack KVM.
Open architecture	No. Although OpenStack supports ESX/ESXi hypervisor, VMware cloud is based on proprietary technology and APIs.	Yes.  Open architecture based on OpenStack, integrated with existing infrastructure/investments. HP Public cloud is one of the few public clouds in the world which are based on OpenStack.
Physical infrastructure provisioning	No.	Yes.  Out of the box Physical Server and on-demand Storage provisioning.
Advanced Functionalities  included	No. Not part of vCloud Standard. Advanced suite includes capacity optimization but only for VMware VMs.	Yes.  CloudSystem Matrix includes Capacity planning and Recovery management for physical and virtual, multi-vendor environment.

 In order to get the full functionality that CloudSystem Matrix offers and have DR capabilities, capacity planning, chargeback etc., the customer should upgrade to vCloud Enterprise suite:

Unique to vCloud Standard/Advanced Suites:

ü  vCloud Networking & Security, such as fencing and VXLAN capabilities (in the Advanced suite).

ü  Advanced suite includes change management for vSphere ESXi and VMware VMs.

Pricing comparison:

CloudSystem Matrix has much better pricing model than the vCloud suite. The MOE license is per physical server (unlimited VMs), vCloud suite license is per processor.

In addition, in order to use vCloud suite (any kind), the customer must upgrade to
vSphere Enterprise Plus. Although these licenses are included in the vCloud suite offer,
the customer is required to purchase Support and Subscription (SnS) with this upgrade.
In comparison, in case the customer chooses VMware as his hypervisor, MOE requires vSphere standard only.

HP’s entry into cloud IaaS, More functionality in a lower price

Matrix OE with vSphere standard & 1 year support: $2595 + 2*$995 +2*$323 = $5231

Matrix OE with vSphere Enterprise Plus &  1 year support: $2595 + 2*$3495+2*874 = $11333

VMware vCloud Standard for 2 proc with 1 year support:  2*$4995 +2*$1249 =   $12488

VMware vCloud Advanced for 2 proc with 1 year support: 2*$7495 + 2*1874 = $18738

VMware vCloud Enterprise for 2 proc with 1 year support: 2*$11495 + 2*2874 = $28738

**VMware Pricing obtained from VMware website: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/pricing.html

HP CloudSystem Enterprise in comparison to vCloud Suite Enterprise:

Both HP CSA and VMware vCAC (formerly DynamicOps), provides platform-as-a-service- PaaS, which allows customers to provision applications (and not only infrastructure).
HP CloudSystem Enterprise uses CSA to provide an integrated, highly automated service lifecycle management platform, and MOE to provision and monitor infrastructure. Together they are working seamlessly to provide a full range of service models -IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS via an intuitive self-service portal, with enhanced service options.

CSA strengths:

·         Single pane of glass to manage all IT services in a hybrid delivery model.

·         Highly automated cloud lifecycle management solution with easy-to-use, self-service portal and graphical service designer for infrastructure and application cloud services

·         Enterprise-grade service management with highly available architecture, and unified monitoring, security, and compliance.

·         Open, extensible architecture with customization capabilities, multi-vendor hardware support, and multi-hypervisor support.

·         Core element of HP Converged Cloud Management.

VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise does not offer this.

VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise use vCloud Director as a resource controller, and vCAC cloud management tools for a multi-hypervisor, multivendor environment so it also provides IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.  This solution though, is immature when compared to HP CloudSystem Enterprise. Specifically – security, high availability, more comprehensive, unified suite of cloud management tools. It does not offer integrated, highly automated lifecycle management nor open extensible architecture for Hybrid cloud consumption by both IT and Line of Business (LOB) users.

VMware vCAC offers limited automated lifecycle management for composite multi-tier applications and basic integrated workflows. It has limited capability to manage underlying physical infrastructure- server, storage, network hardware (for example, doesn’t have the ability to provision LUNs on the fly).  vCAC offers rudimentary unified service management, and lacking in key user experiences.

vCAC weaknesses:

·         Limited ability to map business structure, with a single portal for Provider-Subscriber interfaces that lacks business readiness.

·         Design Center and workflow stubs held separated to Cloud Automation Center portal for resource management-service design activities.

·         Poor menu layout of activities, which is convoluted and piecemeal instead of being weaved into an integrated process flow.

·         Emphasis on use of customization modules places onus of onboarding workflow activities on customer resources

·         Over extending flexibility for the end user places concerns of abuse and extra resources for monitoring/supporting end users 

·         Partner engagement limited to use of a Cloud Development Kit, built on rudimentary business logic and presentation abstraction.

Unique to HP CloudSystem Enterprise:

ü  Extend on CloudSystem functionalities invested

ü  Automated lifecycle management 

ü  Support for multiple hypervisors

ü  Integration with HP and 3^rd party tools

ü  Comprehensive service management

ü  Easy to use self-service portal

Unique to vCloud Suite Enterprise:

ü  Enable vCloud Director with multi-hypervisor, multi-vendor support

ü  Cloud Development toolkit to onboard new partners

ü  Broad vCloud to vCloud bursting through  vCloud Connector

Pricing comparison:

CloudSystem Enterprise license is built from the CSA Enterprise plus bundle (per OS) and the MOE (per physical server).  The vCloud Suite Enterprise is per processor:

Pricing comparison on a 2 socket server- 6 cores, 24 OS (based on the calculation in page 5):
CloudSystem Enterprise:
CSA Enterprise suite & Matrix OE & vSphere standard with 1 year support:  24*$1400 + $5231= $38,831
VMware vCloud Enterprise:
VMware vCloud Enterprise with 1 year support: 2*$11495 + 2*2874 = $28,738

In Conclusion:

HP CloudSystem is the Industry’s most complete, integrated system to build and manage cloud services cloud services.

Based on proven, market-leading HP Converged Infrastructure and Cloud Service Automation (CSA), HP CloudSystem integrates servers, storage, networking, security, and management to automate the infrastructure-to-application lifecycle for hybrid service delivery management. The result is a complete cloud solution that lets enterprises gain agility and speed, and allows service providers to drive top-line growth.

As a part of the HP Converged Cloud architecture, clients have a simplified, integrated platform that is easier to manage and provides flexibility and portability between private, public, and managed clouds.

Here is a list with HP Cloud differentiators:

HP Cloud components:

 VMware cloud component: