Eight months ago ex-Beatle Paul McCartney inked a deal with technology giant Hewlett-Packard to create a private cloud-based media library to provide access to McCartney’s enormous collection of music, film, imagery, and music. Today, HP announced that it has launched the library—and while it’s only available to McCartney and anyone he wants to share it with—at least for the moment—the company is touting the project as a demonstration of its technological prowess and globe-spanning cloud services.
“It’s really exciting because even if I’m out on tour anywhere in the world, I will be able to say, okay, ‘Wings 1976 tour’ and instantly, it will come up,” said McCartney, in a statement. “You’ve got all the information, all the photos from it. And you’ll have written accounts—personal accounts and critical accounts—of what happened.”
HP says the archive currently comprises more than a million items, including photographs, video footage from films, music recordings, artwork, as well as memorabilia. The system is what HP dubs a Hybrid Delivery system, which plants HP servers in McCartney’s MPL Communications’ existing IT infrastructure then exports information to a private cloud maintained by HP in its commercial data centers, providing not only worldwide access wherever McCartney and his people happen to be, but also providing distributed data storage in the event of natural disaster or other events that could compromise IT setups in a particular location.
Financial details between McCartney and HP haven’t been released, but HP is touting the effort as a major promotion for its cloud-based services for enterprise and Sir Paul will be headlining closing ceremonies at HP’s top-flight private client event Discover Americas to take place in Las Vegas next month.
it’s not clear how McCartney and crew intend to use the system HP has created for them, although when the deal was announced there were vague statements about making portions of the library available to fans.
