Internap expands OpenStack-powered Public Cloud footprint into Amsterdam

Internap Corporation has announced the expansion of its OpenStack-powered AgileCLOUD footprint to Amsterdam, providing a highly flexible and cost-efficient public cloud platform to meet the performance and scalability demands of customers in Europe and around the world. Internap is also adding powerful OpenStack management capabilities in AgileCLOUD via an integrated OpenStack Horizon dashboard. Today’s announcements position Internap as a leading OpenStack public cloud provider, offering developers and enterprise customers the most flexibility in locations, features and pricing options.

AgileCLOUD is backed by all-SSD storage with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) and Internap’s Performance IP™ bandwidth to deliver consistently higher network performance and lower latency to end users when compared to other public clouds. The service offers two server tiers to match customers’ specific performance requirements, each with configurable memory, CPU and SSD storage options. Series A servers include shared compute cores and are ideal for average workloads with moderate throughput, such as small databases, website and content management systems. With dedicated cores, higher RAM to CPU ratio and SSD-based persistent storage options, Series B servers are optimised for demanding workloads that require additional memory and higher network throughput, including medium databases, complex websites and scheduled batch processing.

The Amsterdam facility also includes Internap’s bare-metal services, allowing customers to choose the best-fit infrastructure for their specific workload requirements – whether that be virtual cloud servers for scalable web apps or batch processing or performance-optimised bare-metal servers for big data analytics. In addition to Amsterdam, Internap offers its OpenStack-powered next-generation AgileCLOUD out of its Dallas, Texas, and Montreal data centres.

Next-Generation AgileCLOUD Integrates Advanced Horizon Portal: Agility, Rapid Deployment, Innovation
Internap is also delivering enhanced choice and flexibility for its public cloud customers with the addition of powerful OpenStack management capabilities via an integrated Horizon dashboard. Horizon is the official OpenStack management dashboard, delivering a web-based user interface to OpenStack services. One of only a handful of OpenStack cloud providers to expose the native Horizon console, Internap now offers customers direct access to advanced OpenStack management functions – allowing customers to use an open and standardised interface they are already familiar with and gain access to the latest features from the open source community.

With the addition of the new Horizon portal, Internap now provides a full range of cloud and infrastructure management options that give customers the flexibility to meet their specific control requirements. Internap also exposes the native OpenStack API, granting the highest level of sophistication and control granularity for developers and DevOps teams. Further, Internap’s existing customer portal provides basic administration, controls and billing via single-pane-of-glass management across its hybrid infrastructure services – from virtual and bare-metal servers to hosting and colocation. Features enabled through Internap’s new Horizon portal include:
· Create, delete and resize VMs
· Create compute volume snapshots
· Create and modify compute and networking security group rules
· Backup, restore and create storage volumes

“We use OpenStack’s Horizon dashboard to manage our extensive public cloud footprint with Internap. It gives us the ability to access the latest OpenStack services and manage and automate our cloud resources, along with an extensible framework to easily plug in third-party tools,” said Rock Rockenhaus, cloud infrastructure architect at CheapCaribbean.com “By integrating the Horizon dashboard, Internap has eliminated the complexity that customers running their own instance of Horizon need to contend with, such as setting up and maintaining API servers and installing the latest software – delivering the management benefits straight to customers’ fingertips and freeing them up to focus on their business.”

Internap’s Amsterdam location and Horizon portal are now available through an early access program and will be generally available in December 2014.