Internap Corporation has announced the general availability of the next generation of its bare-metal Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, AgileSERVER 2.0. A high-performance IaaS option, AgileSERVER 2.0 features significant hardware, networking and management advancements designed to meet the needs of enterprises and devops teams deploying mission-critical applications and big-data workloads on OpenStack.
Trends such as big data growth, the increase in rich media and the app economy are driving the need for high-performance infrastructure across nearly every major industry. Organizations are increasingly encountering performance limitations and spiraling costs with commodity public cloud platforms, particularly as they scale out their application environments. Since 2012, companies with performance-reliant workloads – such as eXelate, Taptica, Distil Networks, CrowdStar and more – have been turning to Internap’s automated bare-metal service, AgileSERVER, to build global, scale-out application environments. AgileSERVER combines the dedicated processing power of bare metal with the agility of the cloud, allowing companies to achieve peak performance and scalability for mission critical workloads.
Key features of AgileSERVER 2.0:
- Latest generation high-performing hardware – AgileSERVER 2.0 features the newest Intel-based single, dual and quadsocket processors, and a wide range of memory options up to 1TB RAMto meet companies’ performance needs. Customers can choose from SATA, SAS or SSD storage. For data-intensive applications demanding the highest levels of performance, Internap now offers PCI Express Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Storage, allowing customers to scale to 1M IOPS and deliver up to 10x the performance of today’s fastest-available SSDs.
- Enhanced networking – Internap now offers 10 VLANs per customer to enable enhanced security and design flexibility for application architectures. Internap is also increasing the Universal Transfer allotment to 10 TB per server of its route-optimized Performance IPä connectivity service, resulting in lower latency and accelerated application performance. Other performance networking capabilities include IPMI for greater control and ease of management for high availability environments, and NIC bonding for increased network redundancy and throughput.
- Seamless hybridization – Customers can hybridize AgileSERVER with Internap’s OpenStack-based AgileCLOUD virtual cloud instances, as well as colocation, managed hosting or on-premise infrastructure to best match application needs. Customers can quickly move workloads between virtual and dedicated infrastructure without time-consuming networking configurations or tasks. AgileSERVER 2.0 will also take full advantage of OpenStack’s Kilo release and corresponding federated identity enhancements in 2015, further broadening hybrid and multi-cloud use case opportunities.
- Infrastructure management tools with granular control options – AgileSERVER 2.0 is built on the native OpenStack API, allowing customers to access the entire OpenStack ecosystem of tools and avoid vendor lock in. Customers can also take advantage of OpenStack Glance image management functionality and Heat orchestration and auto-scaling capabilities via an integrated Horizon OpenStack management dashboard. Customers can use Glance to quickly import disk images from other service providers onto AgileSERVER and move disk images from AgileSERVER to other bare-metal or virtualized environments. Businesses with a DevOps orientation can use Heat orchestration to automate provisioning based on pre-defined architectures and define additional rules for provisioning and terminating instances based on criteria such as CPU load or bandwidth traffic changes.
- Per-second billing – In addition to existing hourly and monthly configurations, organizations that need micro-bursts of high-performing infrastructure for specific tasks, such as media rendering, now also have the option of paying on a per-second basis, more precisely aligning costs with capacity demand.
This article was originally posted “Internap Launches AgileSERVER 2.0” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
