HP has unveiled its latest incarnation of HP Helion OpenStack with a demonstration of Version 2.0 at the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Tokyo.

After it recently announced the imminent closure of its OpenStack driven public cloud offering, the vendor is thought to be concentrating its efforts to help enterprise clients cope with the challenge of straddling private and hybrid cloud environments. This, according to analyst IDC, is the biggest market in the industry with $118 billion of business being generated in 2015.

HP said it has marshalled all the resources withdrawn from the public cloud and sent them to fight on the Hybrid cloud front. The numbers will help the vendor establish confidence among its enterprise customers, according to Bill Hilf, the general manager of HP’s cloud division. “Customers want to put OpenStack technology into production with the confidence that they are backed by the experience and support of a trusted end-to-end technology partner,” said Hilf.

From a technical perspective, the HP platform will be easier to use, said Hilf. In the new version of Helion, created out of the OpenStack Kilo stable, laying on new infrastructure will be a lot easier for system builders and CIOs, he said. The cost of ownership will be lowered, and projects will advance quicker, thanks to a much more user-friendly administrator interface. The problems of integrating different clouds into one hybrid will be easier to confront now, Hilf told the OpenStack Summit audience, because HP is instilling an internal policy of strict adherence to OpenStack application programme interface (API) standards in a bid to speed up cross-cloud compatibility.

HP also claimed that Helion OpenStack 2.0 will allow customers to create and manage software defined networks (SDN) in a distributed, multi-datacentre environment through integration with HP Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) and Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform. This, it claims, removes the boundaries of traditional networking and unlocks the full automation and liquidity needed for running a proper hybrid cloud.