In light of the electronics’ giant graduate move into the cloud and software markets, Hewlett-Packard has landed yet another high-profile contract with NASA. Late last year, we’ve learned that HP has entered into a $2.5 billion, 10 year agreement with NASA to manage the bulk of the space agency’s IT infrastructure. This deal includes among others personal computing, which is also the central focus of HP and NASA’s latest contract. Also worth $2.5 billion, news of the latter broke today. the contract has a four-year base period with two additional three-year option periods, and focuses on improving collaboration for NASA employees.

“The company says it will provide computing services and devices to more than 60,000 users as part of the deal. It will modernize the space agency’s computer systems used by employees.”

This deal represents a pickup in the currently declined IT government spending, which affected a number of major tech companies including HP itself in Q1, according to CEO Leo Apotheker.

Hewlett-Packard is investing a lot in gaining new customers, and attracting new partners. One of the newest ones is hosting company Opus Interactive, who has recently deployed HP’s Converged Infrastructure in its datacenters to improve scalability and efficiency.

Going back to NASA, the agency has quite a few initiatives going on right now, including OpenStack. The space agency is one of the key contributors to the open-source cloud OS project, which is accelerating into its second year as it gains more and more support and interest.

One of the most notable recent OpenStack developments is the launch of the latest release – Cactus. All new and improved, the release brought along the latest version of the OpenStack API which now comes with support for extensions, added support for all major virtualization technologies OpenStack Compute and beyond .