Customer growth in Europe and the United States is prompting Blue Box to continue executing on its global capacity expansion. The company has expanded its relationship with Juniper Networks to build new capacity for its Blue Box Cloud solution at two data centers, one in London and the other at an existing facility in Ashburn.
The opening of the company’s first data center in the U.K. makes Blue Box Cloud available to European customers who require European Union (EU) data center residency.
“Blue Box Cloud delivers all of the benefits of a private cloud while removing the burden of day-to-day infrastructure operations. That combination means our customers can focus on developing applications that drive true value to their businesses. Existing customer growth and new deployments will continue to drive our plans for expanding both our data center footprint as well as capacity at existing facilities in the year ahead,” said Matthew Schiltz, CEO of Blue Box.
This is the first full data center that Blue Box is building with integrated routing, switching and security technology exclusively from Juniper Networks. Blue Box will use Juniper Networks® SRX Series Services Gateways to secure its network, and has standardized on Juniper Networks MX480 3D Universal Edge Routers, QFX5100 data center switches and EX4200 Ethernet switches.
“We are proud to deliver the technology that will secure private cloud as a service to new customers as Blue Box continues to expand and grow. Blue Box, with its operational expertise and software capabilities, is successfully deploying reliable and secure private clouds quickly in production environments and we are excited that Juniper will power the new facility in Europe – and the expanded facility in Ashburn," said Mike Marcellin, senior vice president of marketing and strategy at Juniper Networks.
With the London expansion, Blue Box increases its global footprint for Blue Box Cloud to four locations, aligning with key markets in North America and EMEA. The London data center will meet EU data sovereignty requirements and join an existing European data center for Blue Box Cloud in Zurich.
The Ashburn data center expansion doubles the company’s current Blue Box Cloud capacity in that facility. The expansion is in response to growing demand from Blue Box Cloud customers requiring additional compute and storage resources to support new and growing application workloads hosted in the facility.
European Proof of Concept Program Underway
Blue Box recently announced a proof-of-concept (PoC) program for European customers evaluating OpenStack-powered private clouds. The program helps customers determine whether a hosted or an on-prem private cloud solution is better suited to their workloads. As part of the launch of the PoC and the new U.K. data center, Blue Box will sponsor Cloud Expo Europe in London on March 11 and 12. Blue Box is targeting participants in market sectors with specific workloads requiring control, performance, security and predictability in a variety of sectors, including media and entertainment, financial services, technology and retail.
Blue Box is exhibiting with the OpenStack Foundation and other OpenStack community members in the Open Cloud Park, Pod #3, at Cloud Expo Europe. In addition, Blue Box CTO and founder Jesse Proudman will speak during two sessions:
- Public vs Private vs Hybrid Cloud: Which One? (in the Open Cloud Theater)
- Interoperability on the Cloud: Myth or Reality? (Panel in Cloud Service Providers & Business Theater)
Private Cloud as a Service Benefits
PCaaS is a term describing private cloud infrastructure resources deployed in a managed environment, on hardware dedicated to specific customers. PCaaS provides the security, performance and cost stability of private cloud, coupled with the agility, scalability and handsfree management common to public clouds. Blue Box Cloud is an OpenStack-powered PCaaS solution that offers the additional benefits of Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service.
This article was originally posted “Blue Box Expands Operations” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
