Virtualization through cloud services and data center connectivity is a great way to streamline operations and reduce costs for enterprise communications, but plenty of businesses also have traditional colocation footprints as well, meaning that gaining visibility into the infrastructure as a whole can be a challenge. Internap Network Services Corp. is looking to tackle that with the launch of “cloudy colo” capabilities. The idea is to deliver cloud-like remote visibility and management benefits to colocation customers and enable on-demand hybridization of cloud and colocation footprints within the data center, through a universal customer portal.
While cloud adoption is growing, colocation will remain a critical IT Infrastructure solution for organizations that desire to retain ownership and control of the compute, storage and network equipment. However, traditional colocation typically lacks the transparency and automation inherent in cloud services, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of the environment. In addition, colocated enterprises increasingly require the more flexibility to quickly and easily address a wide range of use cases – such as scale-out Web applications or “bursty” and unpredictable workloads – resulting in the need to access a mix of infrastructure options.
“Based on growing comfort with the automation offered by cloud services, organizations are seeking easier and faster access to their infrastructure,” said Carl Brooks, analyst, internet infrastructure services at 451 Research. “As a result, there’s a strong opportunity for service providers to give customers access to elastic, on-demand resources with new kinds of controls, agility, ease-of-use and infrastructure hybridization.”
Internap’s new cloudy colo portal will be provided as a standard part of Internap’s offering. Among the functionalities is inventory management with integrated support tracking, so that customers can review their entire colocated footprint; check device power status and create alerts; deploy stencils for device-level inventory tracking and management; and open support tickets instantly and receive feedback directly from Internap’s NOC.
Also, it allows for on-demand provisioning of hybrid services: Customers can integrate management of colocation – typically a siloed environment – with on-demand provisioning and scaling of cloud compute, bare metal and cloud storage assets to align their infrastructure portfolio with changing business and application needs.
Also, power utilization monitoring and management allows customers to view circuit-level power utilization trends; remotely reboot or power down any configured device without incurring charges; and easily access and view log files of all initiated power actions.
Customers also can view rack-level temperature and humidity conditions; track IP traffic and conduct trend analyses; and capture and analyze device health and usage stats.
Internap’s on-demand hybridization is made possible by its Platform Connect service, which provides private network connectivity between multiple Internap services – including colocation, managed hosting and cloud – within the same data center.
“Both cloud and colocation will continue to play critical roles in meeting organizations’ diverse application requirements,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. “Internap’s universal customer portal bridges these typically distinct worlds with ‘cloudy colo’ capabilities, providing remote visibility into the colocation environment – unprecedented in data center offerings – and enabling the on-demand integration of colocation, cloud and other infrastructure with the simplicity of one trusted network, one contract and one support team.”
