Hewlett-Packard kicked off the second round of product announcements at its annual Discover summit in Las Vegas this week with the introduction of a landmark upgrade to its CloudSystem that introduces the ability to support applications originally built to run outside the firewall. The functionality is based on technology from its acquisition of Eucalyptus Systems Inc. last year.

The software allows regular infrastructure to emulate Amazon Inc.’s dominant public cloud in order to accommodate applications written for the platform without requiring the tremendous amount of manual work otherwise needed to perform a migration onto a different environment. That creates the option for customers to move their off-premise workloads back into the data center.

That’s useful in scenarios where an application development project is started in the public cloud, a common enough sight nowadays, but needs to be moved on-premise when it’s time to enter production due to security or compliance requirements. The addition of Eucalyptus’ technology could also benefit workloads so large that running it in-house is more efficient than footing Amazon’s steep margins.

But that is not to say HP has abandoned the earlier purpose of CloudSystem as the on-premise component of its OpenStack-based hybrid cloud strategy. The updated version of the platform, which is available as standalone software or in a physical appliance, also comes equipped with the latest iteration of the project and newly added support for its object store.

That will enable customers going down the OpenStack route to store unstructured data in their deployments. And improved iteration of HP’s automation services bundled into CloudSystem makes it possible to move that information, along with the applications that use it, to HP’s infrastructure-as-a-service environment.

The platform can run both OpenStack and Amazon Web Services workloads, which is an asset for organizations that are using the two together. HP is further sweetening the deal with new simplified provisioning functionality, however since that segment represents represents only a small subset of the market, most customers will probably stick with the retail giant.

The new version of CloudSystem is set to hit general availability sometime later this year.

photo credit: Image taken from page 95 of ‘Voyage d’une famille autour du monde … Traduit de l’anglais par J. Butler … [Abridged.] Deuxie?me e?dition’ via photopin (license)