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Carpathia Pushes Enterprise Cloud Over the Arizona Desert
8/26/2009
Ashburn, Virginia-based colocation
and managed hosting provider Carpathia Hosting has expanded its cloud
coverage over to its Phoenix datacenter. The company first released its
enterprise and federally focused cloud services into general availability in June, launched from
its Blue Ridge Datacenter in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The cloud service, called
Carpathia AlwaysOn/InstantOn, is intended to bolster Carpathia's colocation,
bandwidth and managed services already delivered in the Phoenix datacenter. The
double-barreled AlwaysOn/InstantOn name may be a little unusual, but it is
purposefully meant to signify the fact that the new offering will leverage
Carpathia's existing managed hosting services (AlwaysOn), and its ability to
allow customer to move seamlessly between dedicated infrastructure and its
cloud infrastructure (InstantOn). This hybrid solution allows enterprises to
have the same level of security, availability and reliability of a
traditionally hosted environment paired with instant access to cloud computing
and storage together is known as Carpathia Cloud Orchestration.
We expect Carpathia to continue expanding these services to its
other facilities. It operates all of its services from its datacenters located in
Ashburn and Harrisonburg, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Los Angeles.
Carpathia was also recently announced as an anchor tenant for Advanced Data
Centers' facility in Sacramento, California. Earlier in May, the company
also took datacenter space at Switch and Data's location at the 151
Front Street carrier hotel in downtown Toronto, Canada.
The hybrid model
T1R first created the analogy
of the hybrid solution being equated to the car buying/renting industry a year
ago – and the notion has been used a great deal by Carpathia of late. As John
Greaves, CTO of Carpathia, specifies – colocation is similar to purchasing a
car, with maintenance done yourself as the user. Managed services are like
leasing a car with the leaseholder maintaining the rights to the car. Cloud
computing, on the other hand, is like renting a car for the day or week. The
importance to the analogy is really to simplify the message for end users, in
understanding that there is no longer a need to commit oneself to any one
particular solution or expenditure – and that different workloads, applications
or problems may require a different resource or cost. In T1R 's view, this is
really what cloud computing is about – not just having a highly flexible
utility resource available, but a hybrid model that is flexible enough to wrap
around a complex solution with appropriate resources molded to each component
of the ecosystem. In order to do this more efficiently, a degree of automation
is needed.
Cloud orchestration
Carpathia has spoken a great
deal about cloud orchestration. The company represents the concept through its
interface, which sits on top of both its cloud computing and dedicated
infrastructure inside the Carpathia Services Platform (CSP). Its purpose
is to blend resources based on a number of criteria such as SLAs, predicted
capacity spikes, CLI, API, disaster-recovery events, etc. It's also a series of
Carpathia Hosting-developed virtual machine images that provide the glue to
make this possible. For example, the solution provides a virtual machine that
can monitor the performance of dedicated infrastructure. When certain
conditions are met, it automatically provisions more compute resources in the
cloud and then removes them when the demand subsides. Virtual machines can also
provide load balancing, layer three to seven switches and provide firewalls
with capabilities to automatically reconfigure to support more application
virtual machines as they are provisioned. This is a prime example of the kind
of flexibility and automation that is needed in order to meet the mark of a
cloud service as part of hybrid solution.
T1R take
Carpathia is following suit
in what continues to be a series of new cloud computing services aimed at the
enterprise segment. While most hosters are offering enterprise solutions based
on VMware, in order to play the numbers and provide a continuum to what
the majority of enterprises have deployed in-house, Carpathia has gone down the
less-expensive Citrix XenSource route. Irrespective of this, the
notion of a hybrid model is proving very appealing to the enterprise sector as
it looks to have some workloads operate on dedicated environments, some on
managed infrastructure and finally, a portion on cloud infrastructure.
Carpathia seems to be getting the mix right in light of its recent enterprise
(and federal) wins – that incorporate having the option of colocation in its
arsenal. The extension over to Phoenix is a good idea as it provides another
backup location even for the cloud services, and opens up clouds to a new
market – that, despite being distance-agnostic in theory, seems to garner a
great deal of local interest as well.
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