Have I mentioned that I love RightScale’s annual “State of the Cloud Report”? This year’s report was full of several great nuggets of data. The main theme continues to back up the previous year’s forecasts of cloud adoption: the industry, especially larger enterprises, have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy to move further towards the cloud.
What is a Hybrid Cloud?
The RightScale report talks briefly about private clouds working in conjunction with public clouds. At INAP, however, we understand that hybrid cloud strategies come in many forms. Not only can we offer colocation for customers to build their own private cloud, but we also have a robust OpenStack public cloud offering for other workloads.
In fact, a “hybrid” approach is 100% feasible solely within our Agile Public Cloud offering. Let’s look at some of the options.
Our AgileCLOUD is the traditional virtual public cloud offering. Our AgileSERVER is our bare-metal cloud offering where DevOps teams can provision and manage dedicated bare-metal instances in a cloud-like manner. Both products are powered by OpenStacks’s standardized portals and API toolset for seamless management. Both the virtual AgileCLOUD and the Bare-Metal AgileSERVER allow customers to leverage each environment’s unique strengths in handling differing workloads.
Why Choose a Hybrid Cloud?
There are a few reasons why INAP’s AgileCLOUD could be ideal for your cloud needs. First, we can support bringing your own VMware license to our cloud. In a recent post, I talked about the option of using your existing investment in our AgileSERVER without any complicated conversion process. This is a major benefit, especially if you’re moving from an existing environment.
Second, some applications and workloads do not perform as well in traditional public cloud deployments. The heavy I/O and transactional requirements of a MySQL or MS SQL database typically necessitate more CPU, Ram and disk I/O than a virtual cloud can offer. This is where our AgileSERVER outshines the competition.
We offer three series types:
- Deploy on Demand – 12 preconfigured server builds that are instantly provisionable via our portal or the OpenStack API
- Upgrade on Demand – 72 upgraded server builds that are provisioned in 24 hours or less and are then manageable via our portal and the OpenStack API.
- Order on Demand – A virtually unlimited number of configurations to meet the highest performance needs customers may have, custom ordered to your specification.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that our AgileSERVER lineup provides access to the full processing power of dedicated servers to meet unique requirements of high-performance workloads and applications. This gives the customer cost efficiency on the public cloud side, while maintaining or increasing performance. This is critical when dealing with NoSQL databases like Hadoop, Cassandra, Mongo, Aerospike, etc. Those platforms require a higher number of IOPs to run properly, and virtual cloud won’t provide the levels of performance the customer expects – bare metal can.
Finally, AgileCLOUD is specifically suited for web, application and other non-I/O intensive workloads. It is also ideally suited for elastic workloads to support bursting in peak hours.
We offer two series types:
- A Series – For small databases, websites and content management systems that require moderate network throughput.
- B Series – For medium databases, complex websites and scheduled batch processing tasks that require additional memory and higher network throughput.
Like the AgileSERVER instances, these are provisioned through our portal and via the OpenStack API set.
Connecting You to Hybrid Cloud
With so much focus on hybrid cloud strategies in current networking outlets and research reports, we urge you to keep an eye on your performance for cost. As our unique bare metal approach continues to meet increasing big data demands, you may want to see how INAP can help you build a hybrid strategy to free up resources so you can continue to focus on projects that add value to your organization’s mission.
