Internap announces general availability of OpenStack Powered Public Cloud

Internap Network Services Corporation has announced the general availability of its next-generation AgileCLOUD. A flexible, high-performance public cloud offering, AgileCLOUD now exposes the native OpenStack API and provides integrated virtual and bare-metal hybridisation to address a range of application needs. Internap’s AgileCLOUD is also among the first public cloud services included in the new OpenStack Marketplace.

Internap has been an ongoing contributor to the OpenStack project since 2010. Its new OpenStack powered AgileCLOUD is a massively scalable, flexible and cost-efficient public cloud platform designed to meet the demands of large-scale, performance-intensive application environments. With seamless, ‘out of the box’ hybridisation of both virtual and bare-metal cloud instances, AgileCLOUD now allows organisations to match their infrastructure to their application and workload requirements on demand. Internap provides the added flexibility to hybridise AgileCLOUD with Internap colocation and hosting infrastructure, all of which can be monitored and managed through a single-pane-of-glass portal.

By exposing the native OpenStack API, the next-generation of AgileCLOUD enables customers to access the entire OpenStack ecosystem and avoid vendor lock-in. With minimal development effort, customers can move workloads between AgileCLOUD and other cloud environments and leverage third-party management tools. Exposing the native API is one of the key criteria for inclusion in the OpenStack Foundation’s new public cloud Marketplace, which is designed to help OpenStack ‘superusers’ and those new to the platform better understand and make comparisons between OpenStack products and services.

“OpenStack is a platform that allows service providers to create innovative, open cloud solutions to meet today’s performance, scale and flexibility demands,” said Mark Collier, COO at the OpenStack Foundation. “The new OpenStack Marketplace features a broad array of products and services in supporting the OpenStack ecosystem, including Internap’s AgileCLOUD.”

Key features of Internap’s next-generation AgileCLOUD include:
· Server performance tiers and custom configuration – For maximum flexibility, customers can choose from three configuration series, depending on their performance requirements. Options include two virtual instance series and a bare-metal series for applications that require the highest levels of performance consistency. Each series features configurable memory, CPU and SSD storage options.
· All-SSD storage with guaranteed performance – Networked (persistent) storage is based on an SSD-imbued SAN, with each volume having a guaranteed number of IOPS. This prevents performance variations stemming from the ‘noisy neighbour’ effect of multi-tenancy and guarantees Quality of Service (QoS). All-SSD local storage options are also available.
· Cloud network optimisation – AgileCLOUD is underpinned by Internap’s Performance IP™ bandwidth to deliver consistently higher performance and lower latency to end users when compared to other clouds. Performance IP finds the fastest route across numerous carrier backbones worldwide with Internap’s patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology, which analyses network characteristics like jitter and packet loss and makes an average of 1,300 traffic optimisations per customer per hour.

“OpenStack offers a flexible platform that gives providers the ability to innovate and deliver cloud infrastructure that is free of vendor lock-in,” said Internap’s Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager, cloud and hosting. “Building AgileCLOUD on OpenStack allowed us to focus on integrating the features that are central to our value proposition, including infrastructure hybridisation and delivering best performance to end users. The result is an advanced open cloud computing solution that allows customers to meet a full range of workload needs, from large-scale, distributed environments to real-time, data-intensive applications.”