Ever since HP first announced its Helion platform for cloud services, it openly stated it intended to produce a line of servers specially geared toward OpenStack. If OpenStack, by definition, doesn’t really need specially geared servers to be effective, then how would HP distinguish its Helion-branded private cloud platform from its regular ProLiant servers?

Tuesday morning in the US, we got our answer. HP introduced Helion Rack, whose distinguishing element is not stripped-down parts but built-up service.

“It is a pre-configured, pre-tuned private cloud solution that is based on OpenStack technology and Cloud Foundry technology,” said Ken Won, HP’s director of cloud solutions marketing, in an interview with Datacenter Dynamics. “It’s really designed to help customers deploy a private cloud very, very quickly.”

No less Than Rack Scale

The basic building blocks of Helion Rack are servers based on ProLiant DL360 Gen9 and DL380 Gen9. These are 1- and 2-socket servers with the customer’s choice of Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 chips, and 768 GB or 1.5 TB, respectively, of DDR4 memory in 24 DIMM slots.

But it’s not the building blocks that HP is selling here. HP wants its customer to imagine a complete rack, decked out with the collective memory and local storage capacity necessary to run its desired applications and customer services on OpenStack.

You see, HP is only selling Helion Rack… by the rack.

“We design all of this using the best practices that we’ve learned by running this huge, OpenStack-based public cloud,” said Won. Working with each customer, HP’s representatives will work out an estimate of how many VMs the customer may need to run on average, and/or at maximum. Given the customer’s specific business objectives as well as its constraints, HP will then map out a rack design best suited for the variable workload.

Then HP will install Helion Rack servers on-site, test them, and deploy services on them at the customer’s discretion. The idea is to build competitive cloud data centers for customers who have never had data centers before.

The Opposite of Open Compute

Facebook – one of the largest cloud data center customers there is ­­– kicked off an effort to specify how manufacturers should build highly scalable servers for high-volume needs: the Open Compute Project. The resulting OCP specifications are, to say the least, saying the least. They’re Spartan, no-frills, inexpensive systems that Facebook contends are easy to replace and easily scalable.

A few weeks ago, HP itself began selling into that market with yet another completely new server brand, Cloudline, manufactured by FoxConn.

But HP’s Won believes even Cloudline won’t meet the needs of customers seeking to deploy cloud services, even internally, for the very first time.

“What we find is, a lot of people don’t know what mode to put on. When other vendors make stripped-down configurations,” said Won, “they actually can’t meet the customer’s needs. They’re doing that to get low price points. What we decided is, by looking at what all the customers are doing on the HP Helion public cloud, we can see what people typically do.”

Intel has recently been reassessing the workloads which it believes are best suited for its three lines of Xeon server processors. It appears to be reducing the workloads it believes are best suited for the lower-tier E3 series, and adding more workloads to the middle-tier, “workhorse” E5.

The most scalable workload Intel perceives for the E5 workload set today is Hadoop, the operating system for big data. On the opposite end of that scale, as workloads grow more complex, it believes E5 is best suited for such roles as collaboration, multi-tenant hosting, and high-performance compute.

The Middle Ground

HP is positioning Helion Rack for the center of the E5 market, using E5 processors and OpenStack. A base Helion Rack configuration will service as many as 400 simultaneous virtual machines on 156 TB of object storage, said Won. However, those numbers are flexible through customizing the number of storage devices.

The company also plans to endow Helion Rack with the customer’s choice of out-of-the-box services built on OpenStack. One of those choices, surprisingly, will be HP’s own Cloud Foundry development platform, enabling customers to begin hosting their own apps at once.

“We selected the right size servers to support a good amount of VMs,” Won told us, “but we don’t put so many in there so it becomes too big. We don’t start with a huge configuration; we start with what we feel most people will need to get a reasonable private cloud up and running, and then make it easy for them to add more as they need it.”

With Helion Rack, HP is downplaying the components of its servers as part of the sale, emphasizing instead the service element. A rack will be built out with whatever the customer needs to get an OpenStack private cloud started, says HP. What this customer wants is a promise, a cost estimate, and an SLA, not a bunch of parts.