The IT Nerd

OVH, a global hyper-scale cloud provider, today announcedit is taking a new step in its partnership with NVIDIA by becoming the first European cloud provider to offer globally the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) software platform, strengthening its position as a major player in the democratization of artificial intelligence technologies.

With NVIDIA’s NGC, the comprehensive catalog of software solutions optimized for machine learning, deep learning and HPC (High Performance Computing), all OVH customers around the world can now deploy artificial intelligence projects and solutions on the global cloud provider’s infrastructures in a matter of minutes, including from OVH’s Canadian data centre, located in Montreal. In order to address the growing needs of the Canadian AI ecosystem, OVH plans to expand its Montreal operations around a hub specialized in R&D that will focus on building Public Cloud services and API.

OVH already offers a complete range of hardware compatible with NVIDIA NGC:

• A new range of Public Cloud instances powered by the latest NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, which offer an excellent cost/performance ratio and are especially suited to startups and innovation clusters
• DGX-1 dedicated servers, which are composed of 8 of the latest generation V100 GPUs, equipped with NVLink technology designed for intensive use in machine learning or deep learning

Different Types of Uses for Different Types of Customers

Heuritech, a startup specializing in artificial intelligence for fashion, received support through OVH’s startup program, the OVH Digital Launch Pad, and benefited from one year of free infrastructure. With intensive computing needs, Heuritech has chosen to build a custom infrastructure using OVH dedicated servers powered by NVIDIA GPUs.

Systran, a world leader in translation technologies for more than 50 years, has also used OVH infrastructures for the intensive calculation of neural networks applied to language processing. These complex translation problems are solved through DGX-1’s outstanding performance.

An Enhanced Cloud Through AI

At OVH, artificial intelligence is not only about products, but is also used internally to provide OVH customers with the most seamless and secure experience possible.

OVH’s cloud infrastructures take advantage of machine learning and deep learning products and applications for maintaining IT equipment, predicting database fill rates and anticipating temperature variations in data centers. OVH gives an additional guarantee, to provide its customers with ever more reliable solutions and a greater capacity for innovation.

OVH, today announced the launch of new OVH Private Cloud – Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) ranges that are designed to support all types of companies with their digital transformation. By confirming its commitment to support, simplify and accelerate companies’ digital transformation, OVH is reinforcing its position as an alternative cloud provider. OVH’s new Private Cloud SDDC offering is being showcased at VMWorld in Barcelona this week, where the company will have the opportunity to demonstrate how its strategic relationships with VMWare and Intel are allowing OVH to provide companies with the best cloud technologies available on the market.

OVH boasts the VMware Cloud Verified label and this year, once again, received theEMEA Cloud Provider of the year Award. The collaboration between the two companies led to the launch of the first OVH Private Cloud offerings at the end of 2010. These offerings are available in OVH datacenters in six countries around the world: France, Poland, Canada, the United States, and more recently Germany and the United Kingdom.

The Best Innovations on the Market

OVH is the first provider of managed private cloud solutions to offer its customers cutting-edge innovations in a unique service tailored to the needs of businesses. For proof, look no further than the launch of VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX)technology for all OVH SDDC customers. This technology enables hot migration of all infrastructures without downtime. Over the past year, OVH has been migrating the workloads of its vCloud Air customers across the world leveraging this technology and gaining significant expertise. OVH remains to this day the only player in the market with significant experience in HCX. In total, OVH will have migrated around 500 environments and nearly 9,000 virtual machines, with a total data volume of 3 PBytes.

Strongly committed to the security of its customers’ data, OVH has enhanced the OVH Private Cloud range with VM Encryption, based on OpenSSL libraries and algorithms, to secure virtual machines easily, directly from the vSphere client.

SDDC Redesign

The redesign of its SDDC solutions range, aims to enable business customers to benefit from new competitive offers that systematically include access to the private OVH network and come with a free bandwidth guarantee.

The SDDC is also integrating innovative VMware vSAN host based on the latest generation of NVMe Intel® Optane™ DC Solid State Drives, to support hyperconvergence and guarantee ultra-high performance. This innovation is made possible thanks to a strong partnership between OVH and Intel.

OVH Private Cloud

OVH offers a cloud that is quick and easy to implement, multi-local (close to everyone, everywhere in the world) and available at an affordable and predictable price. OVH Private Cloud customers enjoy dedicated, fully secure resources in compliance with the requirements of ISO 27001, CSA STAR, SOC I / II type 2, French healthcare data and PCI DSS certifications. It is scalable on demand. From a billing perspective, it is calculated on a monthly or hourly basis ensuring customers only pay for what they use and there are no hidden costs and above all no egress traffic charges.

Learn more at OVH.com.

OVH brought together its entire ecosystem for the sixth annual OVH Summit. Over 3,000 customers, partners and IT professionals attended the opening plenary session led by Octave Klaba, OVH Chairman and Founder, and Michel Paulin, the recently-appointed CEO.

Octave Klaba kicked off the OVH Summit by sharing his vision of a different type of cloud. At the heart of the data revolution, OVH must be the alternative that liberates the cloud and helps its customers and partners to succeed.

And because this data revolution should benefit the many, not the few, OVH takes up the challenge of helping everyone to control their data, innovate and develop new ideas in total freedom through a “smart” cloud. OVH CEO Michel Paulin set out what this means: A Simple cloud, quick and easy to set up. A Multi-local cloud, close to everyone all over the world. An Accessible cloud with fair and predictable pricing. A Reversible cloud, open and compatible. A Transparent cloud that functions responsibly.
A strategy that revolves around four product universes

This vision is reflected in the announcement of four product universes. Each is tailored to different types of OVH customer and the way they like to interact with OVH products and services:

OVHmarket is a digital toolbox for accelerating growth. It meets the needs of entrepreneurs who wish to harness the power of digital technology to develop their business. This universe includes a range of web, telecom and cloud solutions that are quick to implement, simple to use, competitively priced and supported by local OVH partners.

OVHspirit includes all the infrastructures you need to build a cloud platform. Infrastructure, hardware and network enthusiasts who want to build a cloud platform for themselves or their customers can harness the power of a scalable, multi-local cloud infrastructure that is based on cutting-edge technologies designed for specific needs, and offers unbeatable value for money.

OVHstack is a public cloud platform based on open standards. It is aimed at followers of the cloud-ready approach who need to develop scalable applications in the cloud. They get a public cloud that is deployed globally, yet integrates easily into their ecosystem and remains reversible.

OVHenterprise is an alternative cloud that powers successful digital transformation. This universe is aimed at decision-makers who want to achieve their strategic objectives using an alternative cloud provider. They retain control of their data by using a hybrid cloud based on both the public and private clouds offered by OVH, as well as any other clouds available on the market.

These four universes, which will be gradually deployed over the coming months, each have their own separate set of announcements regarding how they meet the changing needs and practices of all customers:

OVHmarket, a digital toolbox for accelerating growth

• Cloud Web Hosting offers professionals a powerful and secure environment to develop projects like websites, e-commerce platforms and mobile apps. This innovative solution combines the simplicity of managed hosting with the benefits of a dedicated virtual private server, and does not require administrative expertise.
• The Visibility Pro solution allows Web Hosting customers to manage their company profile and contact details in multiple online directories via a single interface, the OVH Control Panel. It also helps customers boost their visibility in searches, social networks and web browsers, and facilitates interactions with their communities by publishing targeted content and responding to comments.

OVHspirit, everything you need to build a cloud platform

• OVH customers with Dedicated Servers will see their bandwidth doubled in the coming weeks – without any price increase. Customers with a top speed of 500 Mbp/s will see it increased to 1 Gbp/s at the same price.
• The company will significantly overhaul its Dedicated Server ranges. The aim is to create a product offering that is more diverse, easier to understand and more in line with professional use, while remaining competitive in price. The dedicated and virtual private servers in these ranges will, as always, benefit from OVH’s modular storage as well as its network and security services: a global proprietary fibre optic network with a capacity of 15 Tbps and 34 points of presence, including anti-DDoS protection at no additional cost. They will be available in 28 OVH data centres spread over four continents, including the US. In addition, OVH remains the only global cloud provider to offer dedicated servers with or without the Patriot Act and CLOUD Act.
• OVH is updating its premium Dedicated Servers. The HG 2019 servers meet the needs of companies seeking top-range reliability, security and performance while minimising costs. Based on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, Intel® Optane™ DC technologies and 3D NAND Solid State Drives, they are particularly well-suited to intensive data processing. This innovation was made possible thanks to a strong partnership between OVH and Intel to build the next generation of cloud infrastructure services. Plus, before the end of the year, OVH will enhance the range with servers specially designed for artificial intelligence applications.

OVHstack, the public cloud platform based on open standards

• To meet the expectations of cloud natives and developers who want to evolve towards microservice architectures, OVH is launching Managed Kubernetes in private beta. The promise: a plug-and-play Kubernetes platform managed on the OVH Public Cloud, combining agility, flexibility and performance at a competitive cost.
• To make it easier to extract value from data, OVH is announcing a wide range of other ready-to-use data infrastructures: OVH Analytics Data Platform, a fully open-source big data analytics solution based on Apache Hadoop and deployable within one hour on the Public Cloud; plus enhancements to the Cloud Databases solutions, which from now on will include MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis. In conjunction with these data management and processing offers, and to accelerate the adoption of deep learning technologies, OVH is adding a new GPU family to its Public Cloud catalogue: a GPU NVIDIA solution from the TESLA V100 range and the associated software platform, NVIDIA GPU Cloud. Innovation will not stop there this year, with a Cloud Databases solution complemented by high-availability solutions, a turn-key machine learning platform and data processing tools such as Apache Spark as-a-service.
• OVH is also driving growth in the Asia-Pacific region by introducing Public Cloud solutions, including the Instance and Storage ranges, in the Singapore and Sydney data centres before the end of the year. Three new Public Cloud availability zones will also be launched in France. In addition, the Public Cloud solution will include a virtual router and a Load Balancer (Instance range), as well as a set of tools for monitoring resource usage and performance.

OVHenterprise, an alternative cloud to power successful digital transformation

• OVH continues to enhance its product offerings in order to support companies seeking to implement a multi-cloud strategy by combining on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Enter OVHcloud Connect, which allows companies to connect to the OVH network in a totally isolated and secure way via numerous points of presence around the world, while offering maximum reliability and flexibility.
• There is also a significant enhancement to OVH’s Software-Defined Datacentre (SDDC) offer: the integration of VMware’s vSAN technology. In a further step towards hyper-convergence and ultra-high performance, vSAN hosts integrate local storage based on the latest NVMe/SSD technologies.
• The company continues to strengthen relationships with its technology partners. A particular highlight is the Veeam Enterprise solution, which provides all VMware users, whether or not they are OVH customers, with great flexibility around Veeam licences. They will be able to set up virtual machine backups regardless of their location (on-site, with another cloud provider or with OVH) and retain control over their digital infrastructure.

At its sixth Summit, OVH reaffirms its position as a global player and leader in the European cloud market, driving an alternative and open model. Amid fierce competition, OVH continues to grow and trust in the power of innovation – the engine of tomorrow’s growth.

OVH today announced its new high-end dedicated servers: the HG 2019 series. Designed to meet the intensive data processing requirements of today’s IT Pro’s focused on big data, high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), the HG 2019 servers will exceed the expectations of organizations in search of excellence in terms of reliability, manageability and security, while maximizing performance and reducing costs.

Combining best in class components and passing rigorous tests has allowed OVH to ensure the best performance at the best price. With 19 years of experience in designing and optimizing servers, the company is able to standardize and offer at large scale, servers equipped with advanced components such as the Intel Xeon Gold 6154 processor, customizable GPU’s such as Nvidia P100 for parallel processing, and M60 for desktop virtualization, Optane SSD’s, and up to 1.5 TB of RAM.

For maximum reliability, the HG 2019 dedicated servers are built with a redundant architecture at multiple levels, such as electrical circuits or cooling, network connections and power supply. Disks are also hot-swappable, ensuring no downtime and thus allowing unmatched availability for mission critical applications.

This new range of servers takes advantage of OVH’s private network (vRack), which allows direct physical connections between all OVH infrastructures anywhere in the world. With 3 Gbbps bandwidth, the vRack private network is ideal for load balancing and database isolation, all while ensuring the security of machine-to-machine communications within an infrastructure.

The HG 2019 portfolio will also include the exclusive advantages OVH has come to be known for by its customers: 24/7 support, protection against DDoS attacks included at no extra cost, private worldwide optical fibre network of the European cloud leader (15 Tbps throughput). Fully customizable, the servers are already available in OVH data centres located in Roubaix and Gravelines (France) as well as Beauharnois, Quebec (Canada) for OVH users to have a maximum proximity with their customers. Servers will soon be deployed in OVH data centres located in Germany, UK and Poland.

Source: OVH

More info can be found here.

Source: OVH

OVH today released the first set of findings from its OVH’s Barometer on the Digital Society. The barometer polled 2,000 residents of both Ontario and Quebec (1,000 in each province) for their thoughts and feedback on the current state of the education system and how it can be improved by using digital technology.