HP Launches Low-Cost Managed Virtual Private Cloud

The HP Helion portfolio is expanding again—this time into the realm of low-cost virtual private clouds. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) unveiled HP Helion Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Lean, a managed infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that the vendor stated provides higher-quality service delivery and workload performance at “a significantly lower cost.”

The new low-cost VPC is aimed at midsized and enterprise-level businesses with lighter workloads such as application development and test environments and workplace collaboration. HP also noted the cloud also provides customers with quick onboarding times and the ability to add more features on demand.

Basically, the goal is to enable customers to get the benefits of an enterprise, managed VPC for a lower upfront investment. Some of those benefits include regionalized cloud for data sovereignty, low latency, compliance, high availability, security and continuity options.

“HP already offers a feature-rich industry-leading managed virtual private cloud offering for enterprise customers,” said Jim Fanella, vice president of Workload and Cloud at HP Enterprise Services, in a prepared statement. “The new HP Helion Managed VPC Lean now delivers a lower-priced alternative designed to enable clients to further optimize cloud workloads in the enterprise—while still providing superior, enterprise-class service and performance.”

According to HP, Helion VPC Lean provides faster OS and application certification for the cloud, HP Account Support and enables additional enterprise services such as HP Management Services, SAP HANA Management Service and Database-as-a-Service, high availability compute clustering and virtualization, continuity services and additional backup and retention options.

Pricing starts at $168 per month for a small virtual server configuration.