OVHcloud has announced a hosted private cloud range of services. Last week, the company also acquired Exten Technologies, a US storage software company specializing in the NVMe interface specification.
The new hosted private cloud range, services are designed for large organizations wanting performance, security and isolation for their data - at what OVHcloud claims is a competitive price.
OVHcloud says that with Exten, it will now be able to build and offer more cost-efficient block storage solutions. The cost of the acquisition has not been released.
Storage-packed cloud
The new hosted private cloud services will offer a broader range of seven standard hosts, with three new hyperconverged host references relying on VMware vSAN technology, ranging from 48GB to 768GB of RAM; allowing for better performance and reduced latency, ideal for critical applications. OVHcloud has seven data centers worldwide, and will offer data stores up to 6TB in any of them. The service includes private and public network access at up to 25 Gbps.
The cloud is based on VMware standards and guarantees "total technological reversibility", according to the announcement - this seems to be a promise that customers can get their data back out and move it somewhere else if needed, a requirement set out at its simplest some years ago as " never put data into a program unless you can see exactly how to get it out" in the First Law of UK tech journalist Jack Schofield.
The service includes the range of VMware software: vCenter, vSphere version 6.7 (Enterprise Plus license), vSAN, and NSX. Hosted Private Cloud Premier also integrates VMware's vRealize Operations brick to facilitate access to infrastructure monitoring and capacity planning.
The emphasis on storage in OVHcloud's services would explain its strategy of buying storage related companies. Exten, acquired last week, specializes in disaggregated storage platforms that replace local NVMe drives with flexible shared pools of fault-tolerant capacity. This means better deployments for performance-critical workloads, such as databases, video processing, and data analytics. The company’s workforce will carry on to work with OVHcloud's division in the US. Based in Austin, Texas, Exten has over 20 filed patents in NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage software -
Last month, OVHcloud acquired OpenIO, a French company specializing in Object Storage, saying the acquisition will help with the storage of the large amounts of data required for machine learning and AI. Just like Eexten, OpenIO’s staff joined OVHcloud.
"With the global volume of data doubling every 18 months, we are aware that storage issues are at the heart of the concerns of our 1.5 million customers.
"With the acquisition of OpenIO, we aim to create a highly scalable offering, benefiting from the best infrastructure and one of the most attractive prices in the market" says Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud.
