Keeping up with the nuances between private and public systems is becoming increasingly difficult for large organizations as their environments grow more and more heterogeneous, a challenge that is leading some vendors to blur the lines in a bid to take some of the complexity out of the cloud equation. This past week has seen multiple attempts to simplify the enterprise service landscape, starting with Zadara Storage Inc.’s unique new spin on in-house infrastructure.

The Irvine-based startup offers something called the Virtual Private Storage Array, or VPSA for short, a virtualized storage system based on OpenStack that makes it possible to carve up the underlying hardware into distinct logical units which can be configured to meet the specific requirements of different workloads. The product is geared primarily towards cloud service providers, but Zadara is now making it available directly for end-customers under a newly unveiled “on-premise-as-a-service” payment scheme that tries to apply the flexibility of the public cloud to private enterprise  environments.

Organizations now have the option of setting up dedicated VPSA implementations in their private data centers or at a location operated by a third-party on their behalf, and consume capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis as if they were using a regular public cloud solution. That pricing model is aimed at allowing customers to have the best of all worlds: the low barrier to entry and scalability of infrastructure-as-a-service, with the heightened security afforded by an on-premise product that is under the full control of the IT department.

Managing infrastructure on-premise is the safer option for many workloads, but Bitglass Inc. is making fast process on bridging the management gap for the public cloud. The freshly funded firm offers software that uses a patent-pending searchable encryption technology to watermark data as it leaves the four walls of the organization in order to provide admins with the ability to monitor and regulate the use of corporate files even when they’re stored in a cloud locker or on an employee’s device. That approach has nabbed it $25 million from a group of investors that included an unnamed global bank and the investment arm of Singapore Telecommunications Limited, capital that will be used to flesh out the concept and bolster sales and marketing operations.

While startups such as Zadara and Bitglass are working to disrupt the incumbent vendors, Hewlett-Packard Co. is working to catch up. The hardware maker this week pulled the curtains back on  Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Lean, a new addition to its OpenStack-powered Helion hybrid portfolio that is pegged as the most economic yet. Designed for medium to large enterprises, the service provides a preconfigured environment for supporting “light” workloads such as test and development systems starting at $168 per month, which makes it among the most affordable options in the Helion roster. That is still considerably more expensive than the hourly-billed instances offered by the likes of Amazon.com Inc., but those require more tinkering that certain organizations may be willing to pay a premium to avoid.

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