With remote working becoming widespread and an increase in online services, companies are having to accelerate their cloud transition. The demands on infrastructures and technical teams are growing, and the challenges associated with rapid, large-scale deployments of digital solutions have both financial and human impacts.
In order to make life easier for our hosting and integration users, we recently finalised our Bare Metal Cloud universe, with high added-value infrastructure and storage services. This new category of products is called Managed Bare Metal, to distinguish itself from dedicated Bare Metal servers that are fully managed by our users.
We operate Managed Bare Metal for them, allowing them to benefit from our automation, orchestration and management capabilities 24/7, while maintaining independence and control over their infrastructures. Therefore, with the enhancement of other virtualisation and storage solutions, our first Managed Bare Metal offering is called “Managed Bare Metal Essentials, powered by VMware®”.
A new generation of Bare Metal
This first building block is based on VMware, and further demonstrates our capacity for innovation and standardisation, thanks to our ecosystem of technological partners. Having been one of the first European cloud providers to launch a Hosted Private Cloud solution using VMware, our service is now available to companies familiar with Bare Metal, who want a ready-to-use, resilient, scalable infrastructure at the best price. These companies no longer want to worry about implementing and managing their infrastructure, instead preferring to focus on their added value and developing their business applications.
Combining the best of both worlds – Bare Metal and virtualisation by VMware – this solution simplifies the management of virtual machines and associated resources, while also enjoying high availability. In just a few clicks, users can deploy, move, size and back up their virtual machines. The Managed Bare Metal Essentials offer helps companies to both save time and increase productivity.
Scalability and data governance
This range is composed of 3 packs:
- The Essentials ESS64 Pack, based on two Intel Xeon E5 2689 V4 single processor hosts with 64 GB of memory and two 2 TB SSD datastores. This infrastructure is fully dedicated and redundant. The bandwidth of the infrastructure’s hardware as well as the public bandwidth is 3 Gbit/s and is unlimited. The VMware Enterprise Plus licence is also available in this pack.
- The ESS128 Essentials Pack and the ESS256 Essentials Pack will be available soon, with an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 processor and 128 GB of memory for ESS128 and an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 dual processor and 256 GB of memory for ESS256. The rest of the pack is identical to the ESS64.
Resources can be reduced or increased depending on the workload. Users can add or delete hosts and datastores directly from the control panel. Additional hosts may be the same or different from the starter pack hosts; for example, ESS128 or ESS256 hosts can be added to an ESS64 Essentials pack. The additional datastores have capacities ranging from 3 TB to 36 TB. New resources are delivered in 30 minutes, and billing is delivered either on a monthly or hourly basis, clearly explained without any unexpected charges.
There are many VMware features available with our packs:
- vMotion to hot-migrate virtual machines without service interruptions
- vSphere High Availability (HA) for automatic reboots in the event of a hardware failure
- DRS (Dynamic Resources Scheduling) that automatically harmonises resource usage to avoid overload
- Fault Tolerance allows VMware to automatically send the virtual machine to a passive host in the event of a host failure, thereby anticipating any service interruptions
- vROps (vRealise Operations) to continuously optimise performance, management, and capacity planning
And additional options are available:
- Automatic backup via our “Veeam managed backup” solution, to ensured that your data is backed up and restored in the event of a problem
- Floating IPs for more flexibility in developing or releasing your applications
Our Managed Bare Metal Essentials offer has been rolled out worldwide, and is now available in several of our datacentres: in France (RBX, SBG), the UK (ERI), Germany (LIM), Canada (BHS) and the United States (HIL, VIN). Users can choose where their infrastructures are hosted, according to their business issues or the local regulations they want to comply with. They also get a ready-to-deploy environment that is fully operational in just a few hours, and can be fully customised to suit their needs.
The Managed Bare Metal Essentials, powered by VMware® offer is further testimony to how we listen to our users and pay attention to how they consume, use and manage their infrastructures. It has been designed in line with our values, and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to simplifying the deployment and management of cloud infrastructures, with simple billing and interfaces that provide the best customer experience, while respecting their fundamental rights and freedoms, including their data protection rights.
There is no other equivalent on the market, and it paves the way for the new managed infrastructure ranges planned for 2021. These new ranges will be available at a very competitive price/performance ratio and will have our two key differentiating markers – reversibility and interoperability – that our users expect. More than ever in 2021, our ability to innovate by providing an ecosystem, and our ability to understand and anticipate the market, will prove to be our best assets.
Product marketing manager in charge of bringing to market the latest innovations of OVHcloud Bare Metal Cloud Universe around Bare Metal, Managed Bare Metal and Virtual Private Servers.