Turns out the HP-powered “Superpod” is in step with Salesforce.com’s public cloud. But it isn’t something that many purchasers will use.
When Salesforce.com announced the Salesforce Superpod in a strategic alliance with HP, it wasn’t kidding when it said it’d be for “the world’s largest enterprises.”
Despite speculation on the contrary, now we all know that the Superpod, that is designed to present big organizations a dedicated instance of Salesforce.com application services, is per the company’s existing public-cloud, multitenant model. That much was revealed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a Q&A session with press and analysts this week at Dreamforce. He also underscored that Salesforce Superpod might be a highly selective offering open only to the very largest organizations — at the scale of the united states government or HP, for instance.
The Superpod is predicated at the design of 15 compute pods that Salesforce has distributed across its global datacenters to run its entire operation. Each pod serves tens of thousands of consumers with multitenant services. The Superpod happened because “we’ve had large customers saying they need their very own pod,” Benioff explained. HP was among those customers, and the partnership happened in an effort to build pods using HP hardware and software.
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Other than using HP technology, Superpods are similar to Salesforce.com’s existing pods, Benioff insists, and he says these large customers are fascinated by delivering the similar variety of multitenant services. America government gained a dedicated instance of Salesforce.com this summer, as an instance, and multitenancy serves it well in serving separate agencies similar to the FDA and the dept of Health and Human Services. (We do not know what brand of pod the govt is using.)
The Superpod offering is designed for security- and governance-minded organizations that want dedicated connections and assured data residency. “a world CIO can say, ‘I know that this hardware is during this country in this network on this datacenter, and i am going in an effort to audit it and think about it and encrypt it specifically the best way i would like,” Benioff said.
The Superpods are maintained by Salesforce, and the applications and services are updated at the same cycle as all other pods, Benioff insisted. He didn’t offer any details on extra measures of flexibleness or control (if there are any), but he did reiterate that this is often an offering for the most important of huge organizations.
“For the majority of customers, this isn’t appropriate,” he said. “But there are customers who wish to visit another level.”
As for the potential for letting smaller customers run Superpods on premises? Benioff shut the door. “We are not going to shoot servers out to customers, because that truly isn’t our model.”
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