OnApp Cloud v3.1 brings dedicated servers into the cloud

OnApp has announced OnApp Cloud v3.1, the latest version of the leading cloud platform for service providers. OnApp Cloud v3.1 enables service providers to offer customers true hybrid cloud services, extending their public and private clouds to include dedicated smart servers and bare metal servers, all managed through the OnApp control panel. It also introduces recipes and blueprints: two new ways to automate cloud service provisioning, from tweaking the configuration of a single virtual machine, to deploying ready-to-run application stacks on a mix of dedicated servers and cloud infrastructure.

Together, these features expand the range of services that OnApp Cloud can be used to provide, and bring OnApp's cloud orchestration and management capabilities to more of the datacenter. They enable customers to deploy their apps and data on the best server for the job, dedicated or virtualized; enhance traditional dedicated servers with cloud features like autoscaling and failover; and enable service providers and their customers to manage a mix of public, private, hybrid cloud and dedicated servers through one easy-to-use control panel.

“Service providers have to change from thinking about the cloud as another silo of infrastructure, to thinking about the value of their infrastructure as a whole,” said OnApp CEO, Ditlev Bredahl. “With OnApp you can put workloads where it makes sense to put them – on bare metal, on a smart server or in a public or private cloud. You get a single pane of glass into the different services running across your infrastructure, and so do your customers. It’s how everyone gets the most out of legacy and cloud hosting.”

The highlight features of OnApp Cloud v3.1 include:
· Smart servers: now customers who need dedicated hardware can spin up a smart server on demand through the OnApp Cloud control panel. Just like a traditional dedicated server they have sole use of the physical hardware, but with smart servers they also get the automatic scaling, self-provisioning and automatic failover features of OnApp Cloud. Smart servers have a thin virtualization layer and deploy across the network from a central repository using OnApp Cloud's Cloud Boot capability.
· Bare metal servers, which can now be deployed and managed through OnApp Cloud. Bare metal servers have no virtualization layer: customer apps and databases run straight on the hardware to get maximum performance. In v3.1, OnApp Cloud lets you create and view bare metal servers from the OnApp Cloud control panel.
· Recipes, a new way for cloud providers to automate the process of adding new functionality or server configurations to standard OnApp environments. A recipe is a set of instructions that can be applied automatically to virtual machines, hypervisors, bare metal servers, smart servers and the OnApp control panel at different stages of deployment. You can use recipes to tweak a configuration, install apps and patches or create a complete PaaS or SaaS environment.
· Blueprints, a new feature for VMware clouds running in OnApp. A blueprint is a way to deploy a complete distributed application with a single click - for example, a web server, application server and database server. They make application provisioning fast and error-free, and enable OnApp cloud providers to deploy and redeploy multi-server templates for the first time.

Other additions to OnApp Cloud include provisioning and UI enhancements, and more options for billing based on zones, which service providers can use to group different types of infrastructure for public, private, smart server or baremetal services. OnApp CDN now has the ability to manage multiple CDN edge server locations from a single control panel server.

OnApp Cloud v3.1 is a free upgrade for existing OnApp Cloud customers, and will be available in the summer. Pricing for cloud servers remains the same as the current version of OnApp Cloud, with a monthly fee per core and per cloud. Bare metal servers and smart servers will be priced per server per month. Prices will be announced shortly.