Author: Jon Collins / Source: Gigaom
Cloudistics defines itself as a “cloud software platform company, enabling enterprises and service providers to deliver cloud services.” But what does this actually mean in practice — what need does it respond to, and how can organisations go about it?
I met with Chris Hurst, VP EMEA of Cloudistics, to discuss what’s behind the curtain.
- Let’s strip away all of the technical terms — what does Cloudistics look like? Which elements are your own IP?
When you take delivery of a Cloudistics Ignite solution you get a rack-mounted set of equipment, comprising processing, networking and all-flash storage. The hardware is generic and industry-standard —what Cloudistics brings to the party is an integrated software-defined technology platform that enables you to manage and allocate resources in the same way that you would manage resources from a public cloud provider. The platform is designed so that you don’t have to manage hardware and can focus on what is most important to you – business applications.
Customers can start with a base and scale to multi-site and multi-geo infrastructures with predictable economics and performance, just like with public cloud. It is essentially a software-defined Infrastructure as a Service platform, and partners can build PaaS-type services on top: We manage the private cloud from the cloud, with one SaaS-based management portal for all your Cloudistics platforms. In terms of our IP, or our secret sauce if you like, this is mostly in the network layer — networking has been the missing element of other ‘composable’ solutions to date.
We address that missing element by abstracting the hardware, turn everything into resource pools that can be composed into a physical or logical virtual data center for each tenant on the platform. Cloudistics takes it a step beyond software-defined networking (SDN) towards network platform virtualization (NPV). Importantly, because we remove the restrictions of file systems and clusters, we reduce complexity while increasing performance and flexibility.
- So, it’s cloud-in-a-box, cool. As an enterprise customer, won’t I still have to manage the hardware?
We work with channel partners and managed service providers to deliver pre-emptive support services, through our “Accelerate” channel program. The experience is transparent to the customer organisation, which can treat provisioning of Cloudistics-based infrastructure in the same way as it would services from any other cloud provider. Cloudistics is purposely engineered to provide a premium experience due to its “customer inspired design”, as described above.
A key component is the manner in which we provide support. Our approach to support is based on an “anti-public cloud experience” – whatever support you’d expect to get from public cloud providers, ours is the opposite, because the number one most common complaint we hear from customers is that they can’t get adequate support from public cloud providers. Our EarlySense Support offers a single point of contact to call for all hardware and software support. Phone-home functionality is taken to the next level with a response that includes proactive parts dispatch, and chat support within the cloud controller. We also…
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