Cloud services provider OnApp yesterday announced OnApp Cloud v3.1, a new version of its flagship product OnApp Cloud that allows services providers to offer truly hybrid cloud services, utilizing smart and bare metal servers that can be managed with a single platform – OnApp control panel.
OnApp Cloud v3.0 was rolled out earlier this year with an integrated SAN, global CDN and new support for VMware clouds.
This new version adds cloud benefits to service providers’ legacy hosting offerings and enables them to manage a full datacenter through a single pane of glass, along with new automation capabilities that more easily allow for third-party platform/application integration.
Now, entire virtual environments can be automatically built, and different applications and tools can be installed or activated, making running a cloud infrastructure even more light-touch. Other new features include General Availability Zones (GAZs) for OnApp CDN edge servers, bare metal server support and recipes for adding functionality or customization.
Some salient features of OnApp Cloud v3.1 are:
- Recipes: Introduced in the new version, a recipe is a set of instructions that can be applied automatically to virtual machines, hypervisors, bare metal servers, smart servers and the OnApp control panel at different stages of deployment. Cloud providers can use recipes to tweak a configuration, install apps and patches or create a complete PaaS or SaaS environment. They can automate the process of adding new functionality or server configurations to standard OnApp environments.
- Blueprints: Also introduced in the new version are blueprints – a new feature for VMware clouds running in OnApp. A way to deploy a complete distributed application like a web server, application server or database server with a single click, blueprints make application provisioning fast and error-free, and enable OnApp cloud providers to deploy and redeploy multi-server templates for the first time.
- Smart servers: Customers who need dedicated hardware can now spin up a smart server on demand through the OnApp Cloud control panel. With smart servers, customers get the automatic scaling, self-provisioning and automatic failover features of OnApp Cloud. Smart servers have a thin virtualization layer and deploy across the network from a central repository using OnApp Cloud’s Cloud Boot capability.
- Bare metal servers: can now be deployed and managed through OnApp Cloud control panel. Bare metal servers have no virtualization layer and customer apps and databases run straight on the hardware to get maximum performance.
OnApp Cloud v3.1 also includes provisioning and UI enhancements. Service providers now have more options for billing based on zones, which they can use to group different types of infrastructure for public, private, smart server or bare metal services.
OnApp CDN now has the ability to manage multiple CDN edge server locations from a single control panel server.
A free upgrade for existing OnApp Cloud customers, OnApp Cloud v3.1 will be available in the summer. Pricing for cloud servers will remain the same as the current version of OnApp Cloud, with a monthly fee per core and per cloud. Bare metal servers and smart servers will be priced per server per month.
A few weeks back, OnApp announced it’s partnership with Dell for creating three pre-tested cloud packages.
“Service providers have to change from thinking about the cloud as another silo of infrastructure, to thinking about the value of their infrastructure as a whole,” said Ditlev Bredahl, CEO, OnApp.
“With OnApp you can put workloads where it makes sense to put them – on bare metal, on a smart server or in a public or private cloud. You get a single pane of glass into the different services running across your infrastructure, and so do your customers. It’s how everyone gets the most out of legacy and cloud hosting,” he added.
To read our recent interview with Mr. Kosten Metreweli, CCO, OnApp, please click here.
