Tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) yesterday announced that launch of a beta Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) service, called HP Cloud Services.

The HP Cloud Compute service will allow users to deploy compute instances on demand, while the second offering, viz. HP Cloud Object Storage, will provide scalable online storage for all sorts of data.

The tech giant will make use of the OpenStack set of open-source cloud software tools to offer foundation for the new services.

The new storage service is being marketed for a wide range of potential users, including big organizations, independent software vendors and developers. According to HP’s claims, a user can provision resources within minutes.

The storage service can be used for storing large amount of data sets for private or public consumption, and for backing up data and serving static content over the Web. Users of the compute service will be able to upload virtual machines to HP facilities, where they run on an as-needed basis.

HP will not charge for either service as long as the services are in initial beta period. Customers will have to pay on a pay-as-you-go basis when the services go into full production mode. However, the company neither disclosed the price of the offering nor it announced the availability of the full-scale commercial offerings.