Hewlett-Packard Co. has just expanded its HP Helion portfolio with the launch of a new, low-cost virtual private cloud offering. Called HP Helion Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Lean, the new infrastructure-as-a-service product touts enhanced workload performance and better service delivery at a significantly reduced cost compared to HP’s other cloud services.

Helion VPC Lean is aimed at mid-to-large sized enterprises and focused on workplace collaboration solutions and application development and testing. It sports many of the basic features found in traditional managed clouds – including virtualization, clustering and backup and recovery – as well as additional management services from SAP HANA. HP says users will be able to bank on lower latency, higher availability, greater compliance and enhanced security.

HP already has a managed virtual private cloud offering for enterprise customers. The new service is “delivers a lower-priced alternative designed to enable clients to further optimize cloud workloads in the enterprise while still providing superior, enterprise-class service and performance,” said Jim Fanella, VP of workload and cloud for HP Enterprise Services.

One of the main differences between this and HP’s standard infrastructure product is that Helion VPC Lean is available in a prepackaged configuration that allows for rapid deployment by foregoing several options. However, customers can add services like backup and security management for an extra price, says HP.

Fanella said that Helion VPC Lean is probably just the first of several pre-configured packages that HP will offer for different kinds of workloads. It’s hoping to add more options in the future, but it first wants to observe how its customers are using the cloud to better cater for them. “We’re basing them on typical workloads that we see with our clients,” explained Fanella.

Helion VPC Lean arrives just months after HP announced plans to invest over $1 billion to develop a new set of cloud tools for the enterprise. The initiative gave rise to its Helion cloud portfolio for creating and maintaining a variety of hybrid IT environments.

HP is increasingly focusing its efforts on the cloud. Despite its status as the world’s number two PC maker behind China’s Lenovo, the company has stuggled in recent years, making several rounds of layoffs. Nevertheless, the cloud remains a bright spot, and with software-as-a-service revenues steadily increasing each quarter, HP will be confident it can grab a sizeable portion of a cloud services market that IDC predicts will be worth some $135 billion by 2017.

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