It’s always interesting to be asked why a product is called what it is called, but I’ve come to expect it when travelling and meeting new people. However, I didn’t expect to hear it in the office the other day, and that has led me to write this post.
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.47-48
We don’t sell roses, but we do sell AgileSERVERS.
So what is an AgileSERVER? What makes our servers so agile? What makes our servers so grandiose that we feel the need to overcapitalize them? All good questions…
What is an AgileSERVER?
An AgileSERVER is a dedicated server that resides in the Internap datacenter and is available on an hourly, monthly, or annual basis. This is a good option for Internap customers who use our world-class datacenters for Colocation, but also need a solution for flexible infrastructure on potentially a short-term basis. While many service providers offer hosted servers on a monthly basis, offering them on an hourly basis provides our clients with increased business agility to align their IT costs and capacity needs in near real-time.
What makes our servers so agile?
Providing flexibility to pay for dedicated servers on a granular level is just one piece of the puzzle. The servers have to provision quickly so that the infrastructure is available when needed, so we offer some “instant config” servers that can be online in less than ten minutes. If your application requires a different configuration, this can be ready in a matter of hours. This rapid provisioning creates IT agility to provide infrastructure to your end-users and brings cloud-like instant gratification to dedicated servers.
What makes our servers so grandiose that we feel the need to overcapitalize them?
The server hardware is another piece of the puzzle, but the network speed and quality are as important as the hardware. AgileSERVER is paired with three unique network agility benefits.
- Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology – Built on Internap’s patented route-optimization technology, each AgileSERVER will automatically deliver traffic over the lowest latency path available and avoid carriers with bottlenecks or disruptions.
- Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Internap also includes a transparent caching CDN that can be used to reduce the amount of infrastructure required to deliver web content to remote end-users while simultaneously reducing loading times.
- Cloud Hybridization – Since not every workload requires a full server, Internap enables bare-metal and cloud instances to coexist in the same logical network. This allows for optimizing costs by not over-provisioning resources, and enables creative solutions for burst capacity.
So why do we overcapitalize our AgileSERVERS? Because they are so much more than just servers. They bring billing flexibility, instant provisioning, and include performance-enhancing network technologies while offering the isolation of a dedicated server and the full performance of hardware without any hypervisor penalty. So while AgileSERVERS could be effectively used for agile development sprints, agility is not limited to developers (or acrobats).
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but an AgileSERVER is so much sweeter than just any old server.
