EarthLink has launched its new Private Cloud Hosting service for businesses looking to migrate their on-premises hardware or virtualized environment to the cloud, while retaining management via an interface with the ability to control security and privacy policies.
To the latter point, it includes the VMware vCenter for centralized management and control across the unified on-premises and cloud IT environment, with customizable dashboards, real-time performance and capacity analytics.
“In our discussions with IT leaders about what they need, many express a common desire to take advantage of the incredible efficiencies inherent in cloud virtualization, but still want to maintain visibility and control over their IT infrastructure,” said Michael Toplisek, EarthLink executive vice president of sales and marketing. “Private Cloud Hosting offers hands-on control for organizations that want and need that environment to better manage growth, control security and data privacy and meet compliance requirements.”
A first customer is the College Network, an online education group, which has deployed EarthLink’s Private Cloud solution to run its core business applications, including its customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning, content delivery and customer registration systems.
“With EarthLink Private Cloud Hosting, we have significantly upgraded our infrastructure and availability of mission-critical systems, which makes people more efficient, processes easier, data availability higher and customer satisfaction better,” said Ryan Sallee, CIO for The College Network. “This implementation was a huge win for our company, as you can’t put a price on the systems availability. That’s the value of an IT services provider, and with EarthLink—I sleep better at night.”
Private Cloud Hosting, available via the company’s channel partners, also has built-in business continuity and disaster recovery protection with N+1 redundancy in a self-healing cloud architecture, automatic server failover, high-availability SAN storage, hosting in geographically diverse SSAE 16 SOC2 certified data centers and a nationwide private MPLS network.
Private Cloud Hosting can scale to support larger numbers of virtual machines (VMs) in a private environment, with EarthLink providing the dedicated resources. The company’s cloud infrastructure is powered by Cisco UCS server hardware and Cisco gigabit networking equipment in an N+1 architecture in the company’s SSAE 16 SOC2 certified data centers. It supports a wide range of operating systems, including 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux virtual machines that can be hosted simultaneously.
