Hosting services giant enters cloud sector, aims to distinguish itself from competitors with high-speed, performance-guaranteed block storage.
Internap Network Services moved into the general public cloud realm in November with its AgileCloud, and it’s now offering compute and storage services from its data centers located in key worldwide communications hubs.
Internap is called large supplier of hosting services from its datacenters; that is answerable for the infrastructure, and its customers supply an application to run on it. Its services include both virtual servers and bare-metal servers devoted to a single customer. It has been edging as much as cloud services because it bought Voxel, with its automated management software, in late 2011.
On Nov. 21, it announced it now offers “hybridized cloud services.” In its lexicon, this suggests that is offering customer self-service for infrastructure-as-a-service that may include multitenant hosts or bare-metal servers. Either option would be activated by customers throughout the OpenStack set of cloud APIs. If a customer uses Internap to construct out a personal cloud on bare-metal servers, it may operate with multitenant servers in a hybrid fashion. “Hybrid cloud” usually means a public cloud service working with an individual cloud, often in-built an enterprise datacenter.
Internap charges $0.07 an hour for a single-core, 2-GB RAM virtual server.
[Desire to learn more about cloud pricing wars? See Google Attacks Amazon With Cloud Storage Prices.]
One of essentially the mostsome of the most interesting features of Internap’s service is Internap AgileCloud storage, a block-storage service like Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Block Store (EBS). It’s targeted at enterprises that make heavy use of block storage and are trying to find a substitute for their on-premises equipment.
In addition to being in accordance with OpenStack, Internap’s service has other differences from Amazon’s. It’s in line with high-speed, solid-state disks and springs with quality-of-service guarantees. Also, Internap AgileCloud storage continues to be just a beta service, unlike Amazon’s heavily tested, fully productized EBS.
SolidFire solid-state storage.
Internap’s solid-state storage comes from SolidFire, which also powers solid-state memory for Colt cloud datacenters in Europe. SolidFire also supplies solid-state drives to Datapipe’s Stratosphere Cloud for its high-performance services.
Internap is not the only cloud company using solid-state storage: US cloud startup DigitalOcean uses solid-state drives to power storage in its customers’ cloud servers. Also, AWS offers EC2 servers with solid state from time to time, usually its highest-end instances, resembling HI1, utilized in large-scale MongoDB or Hadoop operations.
Solid-state storage is a relative newcomer to cloud computing because cloud architectures was designed across the most useful and least-expensive components. But it’s more often finding its way into enterprise datacenters, and DigitalOcean and other services using solid-state storage say it has become more reliable. Additionally they say failures of single components could be managed by a software system within the same way other hardware failures are handled in cloud operations, in accordance with CEO Ben Uretsky.
“AgileCloud is now 100% OpenStack ‘under the hood,’ which supplies an open, interoperable framework that helps us deliver a dramatically more scalable platform,” said Raj Dutt, Internap senior VP of technology. The cast-state offering increases Internap’s competitiveness available in the market, as will other specialized features, akin to bare-metal servers, static IP addresses, and Layer 2 VLANS.
Internap has datacenters in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, L. a., the recent York metro area, Santa Clara, Calif., and Seattle, in addition to Amsterdam and other points overseas.
The crucible of cloud, big data and distributed computing is hell on systems. Will application performance management settle down complexity — or simply add fuel to the fireplace? Also within the new, all-digital APM Under Fire special issue of InformationWeek:Cloud industry heavyweights discuss the professionals and cons of OpenStack support for Amazon APIs. (Free registration required.)
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