The full-service data centre provider Servecentric has launched a new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that aims to ease the issues encountered with hyperscalers.
The company said feedback from users had revealed concerns regarding complexity, cost control and accommodation for hybrid cloud. This prompted Servecentric to explore other options for a more responsive service, with transparent and detailed pricing that can accommodate the needs of all organisation types, including for high-performance cloud.
Servecentric Enterprise Cloud has set out to be different on a number of fronts, said the company, not least of which is the provision of direct chat support, 24 x 7 x 365 for all clients, with an average response time of less than 30 seconds. The service also supports almost all operating systems (OS) and facilitates easy migration to and from the platform as required, covering all x86/64-bit workloads.
Based on a foundation of the HPE Apollo family of high-performance servers, Enterprise Cloud leverages the CloudSigma platform to provide a range of cloud options, from on-premises cloud architectures to secure hybrid cloud, dedicated public cloud and full public cloud.
The CloudSigma service provides near instant provisioning, solid-state and magnetic storage, wide resource ranges of up to 40 CPU cores and 128GB RAM per server, with SSD drives up to 5TB each, or up to 100TB per magnetic drive. Templates offer easy server configuration, covering the most common OS and roles, as well as a wide selection of other options.
With the options for various storage levels, tiered storing is available, as well as sophisticated networking options from VLANs to clustering.
While there are standard options for server roles, Robert Jenkins, CEO, CloudSigma, speaking at the launch event in Dublin, said the ability to offer “unbundled resources” gives flexibility to provision and consume as required. This also meant that per-core licensing in this framework did not have the negative cost implications they have in the physical world.
Jenkins emphasised the transparent billing and options for cost control, ensuring there was no “bill shock”.
The service also provides flexibility to share resources within an organisation. Jenkins demonstrated how resources that might belong to the likes of a test and development team, could be easily assigned elsewhere if they were unused.
“With some providers,” said Brian Roe, commercial director, Servecentric. “high performance comes at a premium. For example, scenarios where larger, unrequired disk allocations must to be consumed in order to attain higher IOPS levels required for database activity. We provide premium performance levels for all allocations – equally. And we strongly encourage users to test their workloads in our environments (at no cost) to see that difference in real world scenarios.”
CloudSigma already boasts an impressive customer list, with the likes of Swiss Post, the European Space Agency, CERN, Siemens and middle-eastern ecommerce company Bamilo.
Bamilo, said Jenkins, needed elasticity to cope with changes in demand such as with Black Friday sales. On other platforms, the company found such burst capacity became unpredictably expensive and moved to the CloudSigma platform. Similarly, digital asset management software company Picture Park migrated from Azure cloud and achieved 30% reduction in bills due to performance increases.
The Servecentric partnership means that data can be geo-located specifically in Dublin, with local support and low latency, ensuring global reach and connectivity, with the reassurance of data sovereignty, and accreditation under ISO 9001, 20000 and 27001.
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