Internap announces beta availability of first OpenStack-powered hybrid virtualised and bare-metal public cloud

Internap Network Services Corporation has announced the beta availability of the next generation of its public cloud, AgileCLOUD. It is the first cloud platform that will fully expose both virtualised and bare-metal compute instances over a native OpenStack API and delivers significant performance, interoperability and flexibility benefits.

“AgileCLOUD is now 100 per cent OpenStack ‘under the hood,’ which provides an open, interoperable framework that helps us deliver a dramatically more scalable platform,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. “Not only can we offer our customers all the benefits of the OpenStack platform, but we’ve implemented existing features that our hybridised customers find valuable – such as bare-metal cloud instances, static IP addresses, Layer 2 VLANs and compatibility with our existing hosting API (hAPI).”

Designed for superior performance and large-scale use cases, the next generation of AgileCLOUD will allow customers to easily provision and manage thousands of virtual or bare-metal cloud AgileSERVER instances – to best fit their application and use case requirements – across Internap’s global cloud footprint, which includes locations in New York, Dallas, Silicon Valley, Amsterdam and Singapore.

Further enhancements to AgileCLOUD include:
•?Flexible configuration options and hybridisation – Customers can choose from more instance types and flexible configuration options to match cloud resources to specific application requirements. Bare-metal cloud AgileSERVERs will function as just another instance flavour, providing customers with a truly seamless choice on a per-application or per-instance basis. AgileCLOUD continues to support Layer 2 VLANs for hybridisation across customers’ colocation and managed hosting services with Internap, all of which can be managed through a ‘single-pane-of-glass’ customer portal and API.
•?High-performance storage – Ideal for latency-sensitive and I/O-intensive applications, AgileCLOUD provides 100 per cent SSD for both local (ephemeral) and networked (persistent) block storage. With finely tuneable, guaranteed QoS on block storage, AgileCLOUD now solves the performance challenges typically associated with public cloud storage.
•?Improved interoperability and no vendor lock-in – Customers can now leverage the management and interoperability benefits of the native OpenStack API and third-party OpenStack ecosystem for both virtualised and bare-metal cloud instances, including the ability to more easily hybridise between on premise and third-party OpenStack clouds.
•?Additional new functionality – Deeper OpenStack integration provides improved image management, block device management and security groups, among other enhanced capabilities.

Deployed by customers around the globe, AgileCLOUD is underpinned by Internap’s Performance IP™ connectivity to deliver consistently higher performance and lower latency to end users when compared to other clouds. Performance IP combines the strength of numerous carrier backbones with Internap’s patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology, which analyses network characteristics like jitter and packet loss and makes more than 15 million routing calibrations daily to deliver traffic over the best-performing path.