OnApp goes bare metal with new Smart Servers

The latest version of the OnApp IaaS platform sees the company jumping on the new bare metal server trend with the introduction of a new type of dedicated Smart Server with automatic provisioning and new workflow automation tools for servers and application stacks.

The platform, which is specifically targeted as hosting companies, telcos and MSPs, extends the scope of IaaS beyond public and private cloud to include this new server type that combines cloud automation with the performance of dedicated hardware. It also introduces Recipes and Blueprints, two new ways for service providers to automate the deployment and customisation of servers, applications and complete application stacks.

“We’re giving service providers a unified way to automate, manage and provision the right kind of infrastructure for each customer workload – virtual or dedicated, local or global – through one control panel, one pane of glass.”

OnApp now brings cloud, dedicated servers, VPS, a global CDN, DNS, storage, load balancers, autoscaling, templates and other IaaS capabilities together in one turnkey platform. This is aimed at allowing service providers to make more efficient use of their infrastructure as a single pool of resource that can be provisioned at will, to suit a wide range of customer workloads.

“What we call ‘cloud’ today is really about abstracting applications away from the infrastructure, and it’s that abstraction that brings the value people look for when they move workloads to the cloud,” said OnApp CEO, Ditlev Bredahl. “That’s what enables automatic scaling, and failover, and self-service provisioning. Bringing dedicated servers into this environment, and extending cloud automation to other types of infrastructure, is the next logical step.

“With OnApp you can turn your infrastructure into dedicated servers, cloud servers, VPS, storage, CDN and more,” he said. “We’re giving service providers a unified way to automate, manage and provision the right kind of infrastructure for each customer workload – virtual or dedicated, local or global – through one control panel, one pane of glass.”

The new smart servers are dedicated systems that combine the performance and security of dedicated hardware with the automated provisioning, scaling and failover of a cloud server. Service providers (and their customers) can create Smart Servers through the OnApp control panel in just the same way they create cloud servers. Smart servers use a thin KVM virtualisation layer with hardware pass-through to provide this combination of cloud automation and dedicated server performance.

The platform can also provide bare metal servers automatically, on demand. This saves manual configuration time for service providers and gives their customers more options for applications that demand 100 percent of the hardware available, or that don't suit virtualisation.

It also provides recipes, which area new way to automate and manage workflows for servers and apps with OnApp, making it easy for service providers to tailor services to the needs of their customers. Recipes can be used to tweak a configuration, prepare a server for a new customer, deploy a custom OS or application template without development, install apps and patches, and enable a full SaaS or PaaS environment. Blueprintsare another new feature specifically developed for VMware virtual server management in OnApp. This is a way to deploy a complete distributed application, such as a web server, with a single click They can be created from VMware vApps images running on ESXi hypervisors in vCenter.

OnApp has also released a new control panel client for Android devices, which is available free from the Google Play Store, and the new version of OnApp (v3.1) is available as a free upgrade for existing customers.