Verio wants to bring cloud to the SMB market
NTT owned Verio, providers of data center and web hosting services today announced their move into the cloud provider market. Their offering Cloudn is powered by Citrix’s CloudStack platform. This puts Verio squarely in the CloudStack camp. Of course this week Citrix announced that CloudStack which they acquired with the Cloud.com acquisition was going to be turned over to the Apache Foundation and licensed under an Apache license. Citrix also announced that they would be supporting the Amazon AWS integration at the potential loss of the OpenStack camp.
News on the OpenStack front also continued today with rumors that both IBM and Red Hat would annouce OpenStack support at the upcoming OpenStack conference. While not a surprise as both companies had been working with the OpenStack camp, it is a good show of public support in the ongoing race for the hearts and minds of cloud users.
I spoke with the folks at Verio regarding this new offering. They had been in discussions with Cloud.com for some time. But the acquisition by Citrix of CloudStack, really made them feel much more at ease. With Citrix’s size, stability and reputation behind CloudStack, Verio and their corporate owners, NTT felt much more comfortable. The fact that CloudStack is now going to be part of the Apache Foundation is also very comforting to Verio.
The Verio team sees the current cloud offering as catering to the larger, enterprise market. They think there is a tremendous opportunity to bring the benefits of the cloud to the SMB market. They have engineered and designed Cloudn to do this. The interface, pricing and features are all optimized based on Verio’s research into this market. But don’t be misled, Cloudn is a powerful cloud service that should satisfy most if not all potential cloud customers.
Cloudn will be available via Verio’s partner channel and not sold directly. Again this is part of Verio’s SMB focus for this service.
Verio’s Cloudn also provides the following benefits:
- The creation of multiple virtual machines (servers) that belong to a Partner’s own respective “Cloud” network.
- A catalog of predefined, optimized VM images, or the flexibility to create custom images and update or copy them – seeing changes within minutes.
- An easy-to-use portal providing one place to view and manage virtual machines and server configurations.
- The ability to add and remove resources or create a snapshot of a current virtual machine in minutes – directly from an easy-to-use administration control panel.
- Virtually unlimited computing power that can be used on-demand, and billed by actual usage.
- The robust and efficient Cloudn infrastructure including NTT Communications global IP network can:Simplify moving traditional on-premise services to the Cloud
- Be used to create new bundled packages for a complete business solution
- Eliminate up-front hardware costs
- Rapid implementation to quickly engage clients and achieve ROI faster.
- Delivery via Verio’s global network infrastructure and state-of-the-art data centers and backed by a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
- Free inbound and outbound bandwidth for a limited time
Other’s have tried to bring cloud to the SMB with varying degrees of success. Verio thinks they have done all of the homework and will succeed here where others have not. Good luck to them!
In the meantime the battle between OpenStack, CloudStack, Amazon, Rackspace and the rest continues on.
