Hewlett-Packard has announces a new Beta version of an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offering, called HP Cloud Services.

The new HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage will offer compute and storage capabilities from the company's own datacenters. The company will use open-source cloud software tools under ht e project, OpenStack, which it joined in July this year.

The beta version of the two services will be offered for free and the company will charge customers on pay-as-you-go basis after full production. The company is positioning the service developers, independent software vendors and organizations claiming that the users will be able to receive resources in few minutes.

The HP Cloud Object Storage will allow users to back up data or it can also be used for serving static content over the Web as well as for storing large data sets. The HP Cloud Compute will enable users to upload virtual machines to HP facilities to use them later.

The two services will be managed thorough a Web-based user interface and REST (Representational State Transfer)-based APIs. The company has already tested the service with some users and is now offering it to more users in Beta version before offering the full service.