Inside Paul McCartney's HP Private Cloud

McCartney's Cloud Gets Wings

Sir Paul McCartney needs no introduction. And when his company, McCartney Productions Limited (MPL), wanted a cloud infrastructure in which to store and serve his archives -- his music, video, pictures, lyrics, documents and other content that would make even casual Beatles fans drool -- the Walrus turned to HP's Converged Infrastructure, which through a set of hardware, software and services built McCartney's and his company's cloud from the ground up and launched a public-facing Web site where fans of "the cute one" could get up close and personal.

HP first unveiled the plans to launch the cloud in 2010 and the public facing site launched this year. Recently, CRN caught up with HP to get a magical mystery tour of what products and services make McCartney's cloud tick. Here's what we found.

The Cloud Lynchpin

The lynchpin of the McCartney cloud, or the component that carries that weight, is the HP C7000 CloudSystem Matrix with all of the blade capabilities and virtual connect capabilities for managing blade resources. This bad boy runs the core infrastructure for McCartney's web site and the Linux blades can be swapped out. It also features HP Insight Dynamics infrastructure orchestration, said Steve Nicklin, HP solutions architect.

The private cloud-based digital library catalogs and stores more than a million items from McCartney's personal collection, which spans more than five decades. Before becoming available to the public, the digital library had provided internal access only to MPL Communications, Ltd.

What Makes It Tick?

McCartney's team and HP both had visions of functionality. The goal was to put everything in a repository, secure it and make some of the content accessible. According to HP Vice President of Customer Communications Scott Anderson, the decision was made to build it out as a hybrid solution with infrastructure on-premise in McCartney offices with physical security and on-site workers in case there were problems, and a redundant system was built in HP data centers as a private cloud solution. The solution is both complicated and sophisticated, but seamless for the user.

The hybrid delivery system, HP said, lets McCartney's company manage and scale the web site at anytime from anywhere.

Secure Storage

McCartney's team and HP both had visions of functionality. The goal was to put everything in a repository, secure it and make some of the content accessible. According to HP Vice President of Customer Communications Scott Anderson, the decision was made to build it out as a hybrid solution with infrastructure on-premise in McCartney's offices with physical security and on-site workers in case there were problems, and a redundant system was built in HP data centers as a private cloud solution. The solution is both complicated and sophisticated, but seamless for the user.

The hybrid delivery system, HP said, lets McCartney's company manage and scale the web site at anytime from anywhere.

More Storage

The McCartney cloud also leverages the HP P2000 storage system and the P6000 Enterprise Virtual Array (shown here) to accommodate the massive storage requirements.

And information and metrics can be turned into actionable insight using HP's Information Optimization solutions, which played a role in organizing and categorizing McCartney's collection for the digital library. Those solutions offer a view into fan preferences, traffic trends and buying patterns from the site, data that MPL can convert into business-actionable insight.

Lock It Down

According to Anderson, security was of the utmost importance, both from a physical and technical perspective. On the HP data center side, it's highly secure. And from a product perspective, the Encryption Switch, TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention (shown) and HP StorageWorks work in tandem.

According to HP, security experts assessed the security needs for the library and the web site to develop a solution that protects McCartney's priceless assets. The system also performs automated performance monitoring to maintain high performance and service levels.

24x7

According to HP, the company spent a lot of time blending together HP archiving software, data protection, storage and other plays to make the site run.

"The key is it's organized and available," Anderson said.

On the services side, there's 24x7 monitoring and a strong SLA so if something happens HP can respond quickly and take proactive action.