If you’re an IT Director at a growing company today, you are probably faced with the challenge of frequent requests for changes at your colocation facility. Now that business is heating up again, the folks in development operations are requesting additional servers, but you’re not sure how to justify the capital expense. While the DevOps team already has lots of projects in their queue and wants to be more nimble, they are likely more concerned with getting immediate access to new servers than with what happens to the equipment afterwards. How do you feed business growth while holding off the capital expense until there’s a solid demand to buy new servers?
One solution to this dilemma is hybridization, where the data center becomes a blend of dedicated and virtualized computing resources. With Internap, you can expand inside the data center using AgileCLOUD over a private, high-performance network called Platform Connect to meet the demand for new servers while avoiding large, up-front costs. (See these capabilites in action at Internap’s New York Metro data center.)
AgileCLOUD is an on-demand service where companies can add and take down servers as they need them, sometimes by the hour. It’s perfect for development teams who need to test new releases in a scalable infrastructure before putting the code into production. Platform Connect acts as a private network where servers communicate at wire speed in either 1GigE or 10GigE speeds. Once the physical network is in place and a colocation cage is connected to the private cloud, development teams can easily add and take down computing resources on demand. Because of these self-service capabilities, the corporate IT group is free to concentrate on more business-critical operations.
There are several advantages to using a service like Platform Connect with AgileCLOUD and colocation resources:
- It’s private. Communications between real and cloud servers take place over a secure, private network. Internap manages the connections, the network and the security point-to-point.
- It’s fast. 1GigE and 10GigE speeds are available, which provides very low latency even though servers are in different operating environments in the same datacenter or across two datacenters in the same metropolitan area.
- It’s cost-effective. It’s easier to spin up new servers as a service until there is a solid demand to buy new servers and install them in your colocation space.
- It’s scalable. Business and operations can sometimes be unpredictable, so scalability—both up and down—becomes important today.
- It’s easy. Leaping over human barriers means getting things done quickly. Rather than wait for another individual to set up additional computing infrastructure, this can be done via self-service.
- It pays for itself. When a growing enterprise has many irons in the fire, the time it takes to simply set up new servers can take an entire day. The time required by key personnel to do this—and again and again to meet the ebb and flow of development teams’ demands—slowly adds up. Soon, you have to hire someone new just to do this amount of set-up. The delays experienced by developers waiting for their servers to be brought online should also be considered.
- It’s worry free. Management of the network and cloud servers is handled by Internap’s engineers, which frees both IT and DevOps to relax and focus on what’s important.
- It’s flexible. Once the Platform Connect service is in place and different resources have been interconnected, cloud instances can be added and deleted as needed.
Connecting to the cloud is not new for developers. However, when flexibility, security and performance are required, the number of service providers that can meet all those demands is limited. With colocation services, cloud resources and the ability to hybridize your data center space using Platform Connect, Internap gives your development team the IT resources they need, while keeping your CFO happy at the same time.
Learn more about how Platform Connect can help you support business growth in a cost-effective way.
