Verio Cloud
n
Innovative Public Cloud Services Backed
by NTT and Built on Citrix CloudPlatform
©2014 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 1
Introduction
The number of public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers in the U.S. continues to grow, with many eager to claim their share in an increasingly crowded marketplace. While customers now have access to a wide
variety of service options, they also face difficulty in navigating such a heavily populated space. Many providers offer services that look the same, making it difficult to separate true value from generic functionality.
While it presents some new challenges, heavy competition can be a good thing for cloud customers. It encourages IaaS providers to offer the best prices on services, and often leads to innovative new service models. The market also tends to favor those providers who offer unique value propositions to their customers. Delivering value through innovation can be difficult in such a crowded space, and providers must develop a unique approach to be successful.
Let’s take a look at how one IaaS provider, Verio, uses an innovative approach to compete in the marketplace and deliver value to its customers.
Verio Cloud
nVerio is a web hosting and cloud service provider that specializes in serving SMBs, independent software vendors (ISVs), SaaS providers, and developers with a variety of infrastructure solutions. The company’s Cloudn offering, and associated Cloudn Customer Management Portal, extends the convenience and capabilities of cloud computing to a new market of consumers. Complete information about Cloudn can be found on the Verio site here.
Cloudn Overview
Cloudn is a scalable public cloud computing solution that lets customers spin up a custom-configured cloud server in minutes. Using the Cloudn Customer Management Portal, customers can select from a set of optimized cloud server templates to install on their virtual servers, or create and upload their own custom templates. They get virtual servers configured to their specific needs, without the hassle of complex deployment processes.
Cloudn Innovations and Differentiators
As a subsidiary of NTT Communications, Verio has a powerful network advantage compared to most cloud providers. Cloudn services are accessed and delivered via the NTT network, one of
“Many providers offer services that look the same, making it difficult to separate true value
the largest in the world, with over 150 connected data centers. Verio passes this advantage along to customers in the form of free network bandwidth. No network costs means customers have the freedom to move data to and from their cloud instances as much as they like without being blindsided by large data transfer fees.
Verio offers an innovative pricing model that delivers predictable spending and more efficient utilization of resources. While most cloud providers meter and charge for all service consumption, Verio provides fixed pricing caps. Once the price
cap on a service is reached, customers may continue using the service without additional costs for the remainder of the month. This way customers never pay for more than they expect and are still free to consume what they need.
Verio also charges dramatically lower prices for stopped Cloudn instances than for running instances. Most cloud providers charge the full rate for instances, even when they are stopped. In those environments, customers that forget to terminate their instances – not just stop them, but terminate them completely – continue to rack up ongoing costs at the full rate. Verio customers achieve more efficient spending because they only pay the full rate for running instances.
Customers also get a great deal of flexibility in how they deploy their Cloudn services. Like many providers, Verio offers prebuilt virtual server templates that make it easy to simply point and click to start an instance. Additionally, if customers want cloud instances specially suited to their workload, they can upload their own custom images that contain their preferred operating system and software stack. This flexibility makes it much easier for Verio customers to run exactly the software of their choosing.
Citrix CloudPlatform
Verio built its Cloudn services on Citrix CloudPlatform, an application-centric cloud management platform based on Apache CloudStack that orchestrates both cloud-native workloads and existing enterprise workloads. Verio has incorporated the capabilities of CloudPlatform in ways that create unique benefits for customers.
CloudPlatform provides a powerful and flexible foundation for Cloudn services. CloudPlatform is hypervisor agnostic, and supports both scale-up and scale-out workloads. Secure multi-tenancy technology provides the isolation customers need to work safely in a public cloud environment. An extensible API allows the Cloudn portal to integrate with multiple third-party solutions and
“Customers never pay for more than they expect and are still free to consume
©2014 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 3 services. This includes AWS environments, an important feature for application developers who want to share data and transition workloads between AWS and Cloudn instances. CloudPlatform also delivers reliability benefits, such as host maintenance and live migration with zero downtime.
Neovise Perspective
While the IaaS marketplace fills with generic service providers, some have found unique new ways to deliver value to their customers. This is good news for cloud adopters, who can benefit from competitive innovation. Neovise recommends that prospective cloud customers look for services that stand apart in terms of flexibility, ease-of-use, value, features and other attributes related to their specific requirements. Finding the IaaS provider that best meets your needs is an important part of cloud success.
With Cloudn, Verio delivers a variety of innovations and differentiators that are essential for cloud consumers. The company has addressed the high and variable cost of network bandwidth, and made customer spending more efficient and predictable with price caps and greatly reduced prices for
stopped instances. Verio has also given customers the flexibility to provision specialized stacks using custom images.
Verio made a sound choice by selecting Citrix CloudPlatform to provide the reliable, tested, secure foundation that powers Cloudn. While most public clouds today cater to either cloud-native workloads or existing enterprise workloads, Citrix CloudPlatform is designed to support any type of workload or application. Customers can design new elastic applications that scale in and out based on customer demand and, at the same time, migrate multi-tier applications from their on-premises environment to Cloudn.
Cloudn delivers the flexibility and innovative value customers need to drive success in the cloud. With no network fees, intuitive and customer-friendly pricing, and an easy-to-use management portal, cloud adopters can hit the ground running with competitive services that deliver real value. The combination of an innovative service model with one of the industry’s most proven cloud orchestration platforms means Cloudn should be a top consideration for businesses, IT organizations, ISVs, SaaS vendors, and developers alike.
“With Cloudn, Verio delivers a variety of innovations and
About Neovise
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