This week sees the OpenStack summit travel to Paris and, in an expected Euro-centric show or force, many vendors are using the opportunity to announce European expansion. Today it is the turn of Internap, the infrastructure vendor that has made a name for itself offering both virtual and bare-metal cloud alongside its more traditional colocation and hosting offerings. Internap is something of a granddaddy in the space, having services customers infrastructure needs since back in 1996.
The company has a couple of announcements today, the first being the expansion of its OpenStack-powered AgileCLOUD product to Amsterdam. Internap already offers AgileCLOUD out of its Dallas and Montreal data centers, but this is the first facility on the other side of the Atlantic. The Amsterdam facility includes Internap’s bare-metal servers as well as virtual cloud servers. AgileCLOUD uses all-SSD storage and has a guaranteed Quality of Service level. In contrast to many other cloud vendors, AgileCLOUD only offers two server tiers to chose from. Series A servers include shared compute cores and are designed for average workloads with moderate throughput, such as small databases, website and content management systems. With dedicated cores, higher RAM to CPU ratio and SSD-based persistent storage options, Series B servers are targeted for more demanding workloads that require additional memory and higher network throughput, including medium databases, complex websites and scheduled batch processing.
Alongside the Amsterdam announcement, Internap is announcing a new OpenStack management capability via an integrated Horizon dashboard. Horizon is the official OpenStack management dashboard and offers a web-based user interface to OpenStack infrastructure. Interestingly Internap has chosen to expose the native Horizon dashboard rather than abstracting control away to their own, proprietary dashboard. This is a boon for users who don’t need to become accustomed to yet another management tool. For customers who want more control, Internap also exposes the native OpenStack API for integration into their own workflows and tools. Finally Internap also offers its own existing customer portal which includes basic administration controls.
Internap’s Amsterdam location and Horizon portal are now available through an early access program and will be generally available in December 2014.
