Hewlett-Packard hopes to penetrate the hyperscale market with Moonshot, an ultra-efficient box built to power the services of cloud providers and web-scale technology firms. The company got a step closer to realizing its ambitions last week, when it pulled the curtains back on Cloud OS.

The OpenStack-based solution is pegged as a private cloud platform that empowers users to lower their infrastructure costs. It provides a common architecture across all HP systems, including Moonshot, and offers integration with HP Public Cloud. This feature suggests that the company is looking to carve out a space for itself in the increasingly lucrative infrastructure-as-a-service market.

HP data shows that if the public cloud were a country, it would rank fifth in electricity consumption. This market is fueled by a rapidly growing consumer segment, which saw the number of Internet users increase by 17,081 percent since 1995. This trend is not slowing down anytime soon: an estimated 30 billion connected device will ship by 2020, along with one million apps.

Accelerating mobile adoption is one of the key drivers behind the Big Data explosion, a phenomenon that is forcing CIOs to seek out new ways to tame their organizations’ information and gain a competitive advantage over rivals. The hyperscale model is proving to be the answer to this challenge for a growing number of enterprises and government agencies.

Tim Crawford, a Strategic Advisor for HP, told Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman that “Big Data gives IT a future, cloud is just an enabler to quickly get there.” He believes that OpenStack has the potential to fulfill this role, but thinks that the platform is too complicated for most enterprises in its present form. Only service providers and a handful of large firms currently have the means to make the most out of OpenStack.

To hear the full conversation with Crawford, check out the video below.