Hewlett-Packard has opened a research lab in Singapore where it will work on a software platform for delivering cloud-based computing services to enterprises, the company said Wednesday.
The platform, called Cirious, will provide a way for service providers such as Vodafone and Verizon Business to offer hosted computing services that are secure and scalable enough for large corporate customers.
Cirious will include the ability for customers to move workloads outside their corporate firewalls and into a service provider's data center when the customer needs additional computing capacity.
Like other cloud platforms, Cirious will use virtualisation extensively so that applications are untied from physical hardware and can be moved between servers -- and between data centers -- more freely.
Cirious will allow service providers to offer infrastructure services, akin to Amazon.com's EC2, and on-demand applications, like those from Salesforce.com.
Several questions remain, such as when Cirious will be ready for market, and to what extent it will use existing management and virtualisation software from HP and other vendors.
Cirious may compete with products from VMware, which has been pitching its new vSphere software as a way to link public and private data centers, and which says it has already signed up more than 1,000 service providers.
The Xen.org project announced a similar service-provider initiative last August, and HP was listed as one of its supporters.
Cirious will be developed in conjunction with HP's Service Automation and Integration Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Automated Infrastructure Lab in Bristol. Testing will be done via a network of data centers known as Open Cirrus, which was set up last year by HP, Intel and Yahoo to test cloud technologies.