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Hewlett-Packard Co. has moved another step closer to realizing its lofty vision for a homegrown hybrid cloud with the introduction of the long-awaited commercial version of its OpenStack distribution and two complementary products aimed at helping customers make more of the software. The launch comes hot on the heels of the soon-to-split enterprise giant upgrading a key hosted component of its hybrid value proposition with expanded support for on-premise infrastructure.

HP Helion OpenStack packs a fairly standard set of features that won’t raise too many eyebrows in industry. The distro offers a graphical designer meant to simplify the creation of deployment topologies, automated patching and certain high-availability functionality for the core management services. More notable is its extensive integration with popular third party products: The platform provides support for VMware Inc.’s market-leading hypervisor and the Linux-integrated KVM – but not Microsoft Corp,’s fast-growing Hyper-V – as well as on-premise user directories and the Parallels Automation service delivery engine for cloud providers.

Helion OpenStack is also compatible with many of HP’s own products, including core hardware products and its recently integrated software-defined storage platform. What it doesn’t work with is the technology that the vendor obtained through the September acqusition of Eucalyptus Inc., which makes it possible to seamlessly move applications from on-premise environments to Amazon.com Inc.’s dominant public cloud – the biggest target in Helion’s sights.

Until their on-premise deployments become truly interoperable with the public cloud, users of HP’s OpenStack flavor can settle for a new development environment running on top of the distro. The Helion Development Platform is essentially a certified version of the open-source Cloud Foundry project that offer access to the company’s online community of engineers and operations professionals.

And to help customers deploy its OpenStack flavor, HP is also rolling out a pre-designed architecture for supporting large-scale installations of the distribution. The Helion Content Depot combines servers from the company’s ProLiant series of servers with homegrown networking equipment to provide what the firm describes as a scale-out object storage solution for handling large, modern workloads. Additionally, the bundle includes integration with OpenStack’s Keystone identity management service and optional security capabilities based on HP’s new Atalla family of encryption products. The kit is geared toward service providers and IT organizations big enough to qualify as such.