The IT Nerd

Today, OVHcloud – in conjunction with InsightaaS – launched a new “Sustainable by Design” report that takes an in-depth view of the sustainability challenges in the data centre.

In the data centre, sustainability is an increasing requirement from business, regulatory and operational perspectives. Today, heightened awareness of climate risk, potential reward in cost and carbon savings, and the promise of improved customer service call for new green strategies in IT and facilities design, build and management. The report addresses how organizations move forward to execute on sustainability initiatives and concludes with a discussion on how metrics can be deployed that can inform the sustainability agenda.

You can read the report here.

Dedicated to its commitment to make its customers succeed wherever they are and to comply with their local regulations, OVHcloud is responding to the challenges of its North American community by introducing a new all-in-one solutions offering – from web hosting to domain names – all from its data centre in Beauharnois, Quebec. Whether they run a small website or a sophisticated ecommerce platform, Canadian businesses have the guarantee of optimizing their online presence with a high level of availability and the best price/performance ratio, OVHcloud ensuring their data is protected and managed properly.

A secure offer, a predictive price

From servers to the fiber optic network, everything is built, operated and managed by OVHcloud, maintaining the integrity of the entire chain in order to generate maximum value, ease of use and security.

Since 1999, OVHcloud has established itself in Europe, North America and Asia as the cloud alternative, perfecting an open, reversible and transparent model that places freedom of choice and data protection at the heart of its priorities. Today, the European leader in cloud solutions powers more than 3 million websites and 18 million applications in its 30 data centres around the world, with strict respect for the digital sovereignty of each of its users.

OVHcloud is enhancing its Canadian portfolio of cloud solutions by adding domain names and web hosting offers to dedicated servers, Private Cloud and Public Cloud offerings. With a diverse set of tools, OVHcloud’s offerings are easy to use and scale for a wide variety of users, ranging from small companies to large multi-faceted organizations. OVHcloud helps support professional websites, blogs, online retailers, web agencies – any project that needs the support of the cloud to launch and scale.

In Canada, OVHcloud’s range of web hosting includes three offerings: Personal, Pro, and Performance, suitable for a wide range of users and guaranteeing optimal online visibility and centralization of all services. Each of these offers can be deployed in just a few clicks from the OVHcloud control panel and allows users to stay focused on their core business, while OVHcloud takes care of all the necessary security requirements and updates. These offerings include unlimited monthly traffic, anti-DDoS protection, free domain name for the first year, free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, choice of 4 CMS modules and many default features to allow users to deploy a powerful web project without any compromise.

Personal Hosting

The ideal choice to start your web project and share your passion at the best price. The Personal hosting package will satisfy casual bloggers, students or young entrepreneurs who want to create their first website. The Personal package includes:

• 1 free domain name
• 100 GB of disk space
• 10 email addresses
• Optimized for WordPress

Pro Hosting

Aimed at self-employed entrepreneurs, professional bloggers and small businesses who want to grow their digital presence without compromise. The Pro offering makes it possible to deploy a professional website capable of handling a large volume of traffic, all in a secure environment. The Pro package includes:

• 1 free domain name
• 250 GB of disk space
• 50 email addresses
• Optimized for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal

Performance Hosting

Designed for the most complex or growing web activities, including multi-site or ecommerce site, the Performance package allows the easy adjustment of resources to manage the most demanding projects, on an ad hoc basis using the Boost option or permanently leveraging the four performance levels. These adjustments ensure users always have the resources guaranteed to them and help to absorb peak loads. In an all-inclusive offer (CDN, SSL, SQL), the Performance offer will ideally support the development of online stores, web agencies and developers, SMEs, SaaS publishers, resellers and corporate websites. High performance and ultra-competitive hosting include these features:

• 1 free domain name
• 500 GB of disk space
• Boost Option
• Up to 1000 email addresses
• Optimized for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Prestashop

An idea, a project, a domain name

Every web project starts with a domain name that is included* across all hosting options. With over 800 extensions available (generic, thematic, geographic), individuals, professionals and distributors can build a project in their own image. They also benefit from OVHcloud’s security expertise to safeguard their digital identity and protect against fraudulent transfers.

Additionally, their ultra-competitive price and the absence of hidden fees upon renewal makes OVHcloud domain names the ideal offer to optimize the lifespan of online projects. Advantages of OVHcloud domain names include:

• DNSSEC: protection against cache poisoning (DNS server poisoning)
• Easy Redirect: simplified implementation of a redirection from your domain name to a social network, for example
• DNS zone management for greater flexibility and customization
• Renewal without hidden fees

Beyond Canada and Europe, the web hosting and domain name offers are now also available in Latin America, from the OVHcloud’s Canadian data centre and will be available in Asia before the end of the month. This is an opportunity for OVHcloud to support its clients’ international development.

For those just starting out, OVHcloud has published a complete 5-step guide to launch their business and quickly develop their digital presence online: consult the guide.

*Free domain name offered for the first year on all hosting offers

OVHcloud has been recognized as a “strong performer” on the North American Hosted Private Cloud market according to latest report on Hosted Private Cloud in North America, Q2. In Europe, as in Canada, OVHcloud is also noted for unifying services while ensuring a Cloud Act emancipated offering.

The report, The Forrester Wave: Hosted Private Cloud Services in North America, Q2 2020, analyzes OVHcloud’s position in North America through its hosted private cloud services across the continent.

A second report also recognizes OVHcloud’s as a “leader” on the European Hosted Private Cloud market, through its solid infrastructure across the continent. With its European footprint of 17 data centres in France, Germany, the UK and Poland, OVHcloud offers robust and scalable Hosted Private Cloud services that enable the company to address relevantly the large enterprise and institutional markets. 

OVHcloud’s virtual storage network is a key enabler to provide customers with greater flexibility and a range of certifications and technologies that can be adapted to meet any business need. 

An ambitious roadmap to support market transformation

OVHcloud plans to significantly expand its Hosted Private Cloud range in 2020, to provide simple solutions adapted to multiple use cases. This new dynamic will be characterized by packaged offers and a wide variety of customizations. 

In the coming days, OVHcloud will launch its Hosted Private Cloud Premier solution, which will meet the specific needs of large companies and institutions for whom the security and isolation of cloud services are crucial. This new offering will be composed of 10 references of hosts, ranging from 48 to 768 GB of RAM, including 3 references offering hyper-converged storage with VMware’s vSAN technology. This will be made accessible to the greatest number of people at an attractive price, thanks to the integrated industrial model of OVHcloud.

The release of this new range is also accompanied by a total overhaul of both the private and public network, as well as new storage capacities with NSF datastores of up to 6TB for a more advantageous performance/price ratio.

Download The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Services in North America, Q2 2020study here.

Download The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Services in Europe, Q2 2020 study here.

The VPS market was estimated at $1.1 billion in 2018 and is expected to exceed $2.5 billion by 2025.This growth can be attributed to the increased number of e-commerce websites, which require flexibility to meet one-off or seasonal peaks in demand. Providing an excellent trade-off between the freedom of administration of bare metal servers and the flexibility offered by virtualization, virtual private servers can meet the needs of businesses in terms of infrastructure monitoring, testing in pre-production environments, and website hosting.

Attractive performance and price ratio

Easy to set up and manage with just a few clicks, the new OVHcloud VPS offering provides great flexibility and boast up to 50 per cent higher performance compared to the previous range.

Thanks to the complete control of its value chain, OVHcloud offers this new range of virtual private servers by combining performance and accessibility with maximum readability. Five configurations are now presented, ranging from Starter to Elite, all priced transparently and affordably from $5 to $151 per month for controlled costs. Available in data centres in Asia-Pacific (APAC), Canada, the United States and Europe, these new VPS’s include unlimited traffic with a maximum bandwidth of up to 2 Gbps.

The customizable Elite VPS’s also offer large vCPU, RAM and storage capacities along with infrastructure to scale operations, hence, the ability for customers to monitor the usage of their resources and resize them if necessary, in just a few clicks.  

Many built-in services

Whether for developing personal projects or implementing virtual instances in a multi-cloud environment, the VPS range provides all the benefits that are unique to OVHcloud solutions, including built-in anti-DDoS protection, choice of data residence, as well as fully guaranteed customer code reversibility and interoperability. In addition, available options include extra disks, snapshots, IP fail-over and automated backup, all with transparent and predictable pricing.

As part of the complete revamping of its bare metal offering, OVHcloud today announced the launch of a brand-new range of Game servers. Entirely based on latest-generation components, the new range is powered by the latest AMD Ryzen 3000 processors to provide the highest performance in the gaming market. It will appeal not only to gamers but also to resellers and video processing professionals looking for powerful servers.

With this new range, OVHcloud offers high-performance business-grade servers powered by AMD Ryzen processors, initially designed for desktop computers. Through a strong partnership between OVHcloud and AMD, the leading European cloud provider enables its customers to fully utilize AMD’s processors.

OVHcloud maintains unique expertise in server cooling, with a watercooling system that has been developed in-house and deployed in its own data centres since 2003. When combined with optimized air flows, this system makes it possible to remove the use of air conditioning from data centres. Thanks to this high-performing process, OVHcloud is the only cloud provider able to cool AMD Ryzen processors optimally in order to use maximum frequencies for all cores.

• The Game 1 range is available in OVHcloud’s data centres in Canada, the United States and Europe. Powered by Ryzen 5 3600X processors, these servers are intended for consumers, students and tech-savvy users who want to host games online.
• The Game 2 range is powered by Ryzen 7 3800X processors and available in OVHcloud’s data centres in the United States, in addition to France. Game 2 servers will also be deployed in Canadian and European-based data centres in the coming months.
• The Game 3 range is based on Ryzen 9 processors. These servers will be available as of February 2020 in OVHcloud’s French-based data centres.

Both Game 2 and 3 servers are designed for professionals who want to host multiple online games via the same computer. These servers will be ideally suited to the needs of video publishers, community managers and professionals that handle creative workloads.

All Game servers provide benefits that are unique to OVHcloud, including ECC memory, IPMI/KVM, watercooling, up to 1 Gbps public bandwidth, unlimited traffic, industry-first built-in Game anti-DDoS protection, and the company’s own global network with 20 Tbps capacity.

Since today is World Energy Day, OVHcloud wants to remind businesses of the importance of decreasing energy use. It’s easy for businesses to overlook whether completing effective work is necessarily energy-efficient work, and we want to help change that.

OVHcloud is an exemplified leader in Green IT – with 30 data centres around the globe run at 98% without the use of air conditioning – thanks to ground-breaking water-cooling technology and advanced design on its servers.

Within their report, Industrialization of the Data Centre, OVHcloud highlights the ways in which data centers can effectively and sustainably get the job done:

• Utilize unorthodox means of cooling to help the environment OVHcloud has used liquid cooling in OVHcloud data centres for the past 15 years and is now using it to cool 380,000 commoditized servers. OVHcloud’s DC location, south of Montréal, is stationed near a hydroelectric plant, sustaining clean and renewable energy consumption.
• Use autonomous monitoring and control By moving from centralized cooling, centralized power, and centralized distribution to granular control at the rack level, you’re able to control levels of reliability, density and power consumption, eliminating overprovisioning and minimizing unnecessary energy use by controlling the behaviour.
• Operate in stages, keeping power density in mind and operational levels low One of the main issues in data centers is power density – the more equipment there is in a given space, the hotter it gets. By keeping in mind, the longevity of equipment – moving on from simply switching servers “on and off”, and operating in stages, reduces cost and increases ROI.

For its 7^th Summit, OVHcloud is bringing together its whole community for the annual meetup at Porte de Versailles, Paris. For the opening keynote, presented by OVHcloud’s Founder and Chairman Octave Klaba and CEO Michel Paulin, nearly 10,000 people are expected to follow the event, either by going to the Paris Expo, or via video stream around the world.

The company’s ambition is to offer a European alternative in the cloud market and its 20^th anniversary marks a new milestone in its growth. OVHcloud is demonstrating its capacity for international growth, support and innovation. It is resolutely focused on the cloud and intends to contribute to an emerging ecosystem of trusted solutions in Europe.

A new name for a new era

OVH’s 20^th anniversary is an opportunity to remind everyone of the company’s positioning, with more than 70 per cent of its revenue focused on cloud solutions. By adopting the name OVHcloud, the group is aligning its identity with its business development strategy in order to support its international growth.

Keeping up the SMART strategy

In spite of the name change, OVHcloud’s DNA is firmly retaining its core values: openness, to usher in the emergence of an ecosystem based on respect for data. OVHcloud continues to defend its vision of a SMART cloud: simple to implement, multi-local, accessible and predictable, reversible and open and finally, transparent. Faced with the challenges posed by the Cloud Act, OVHcloud offers solutions that are trustworthy and respectful of European values. It promotes an open and truly reversible cloud, where all customers are free to choose a way of managing their data that suits their business challenges.

Constant innovation for a SMARTer cloud

Through its four universes, OVHcloud is following its development and innovation axes, to offer its customers solutions and products that are adapted to suit their needs and resource usage.

Supporting IT decision-makers in their digital transition with Enterprise

With Enterprise products and solutions, IT decision-makers have the opportunity to secure their digital transition projects based on a transparent, reversible, predictive and multi-local cloud. This year, the Bare Metal portfolio will be enriched with dedicated server clusters, based on a private network with guaranteed performance, through standard APIs for better automation. The company will soon update its line of premium customisable HG dedicated servers with the latest-generation Intel® Cascade Lake™ and AMD EPYC™ 2^nd generation CPUs, to offer users even more performance and reliability. Finally, the group is pursuing its global certification strategy, and is undergoing the SecNumCloud qualification process.

Providing an open, standard environment for DevOps who need to develop scalable cloud-based applications with the Public Cloud

With the Public Cloud product line, developers can start their activity instantly, with the flexibility of on-demand resources that allow them to adjust their resource usage to suit their needs, simply and quickly. The company also remains true to its commitments by using open and interoperable standards: Public Cloud Storage is now available with support for S3 APIs, and the alignment of Public Cloud with RefStack tools will soon be complete.

Meeting the needs of infrastructure, hardware and network enthusiasts looking to build a cloud platform with server solutions

System administrators can use server solutions to build their infrastructure for the best price and performance available on the market. This year, OVHcloud has completely redesigned its range of dedicated servers, aiming to simplify the range and make it more versatile. To meet the scalability and performance requirements of medium-sized enterprises, government agencies and universities, OVHcloud recently launched its new range of Infrastructure dedicated servers. You can use them to build server architectures in clusters and manage large databases. All servers in the Infrastructure range are equipped with the latest technology, OVHcloud Link Aggregation (OLA), which allows users to aggregate the network interfaces of each server to increase its availability, while isolating it from the public network and possible threats. Some servers in the Infrastructure range also provide advanced security features via Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology, which fully isolates code that is being run, and data that is being processed.

OVHcloud will also be launching in early 2020 its brand-new Virtual Private Server offer. Simple and easy to scale, from STARTER to ELITE. It will deliver great options such as Automated Backup with a 99.9%  SLA.

Finally, as a pure player for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), OVHcloud relies on a rich network of partners, with all of the skills required to deploy and maintain services for its own customers. To invest in this, the company has redesigned the OVHcloud Partner Program, to better support companies’ digital transformations. This is also another way in which the company is focusing on its internationalisation. The program is open and compliant with OVHcloud’s DNA, and its first members already include companies such as Thales, Capgemini and Deloitte.

Six months after announcing a complete revamp of its dedicated server ranges, OVH is now launching its new Infrastructure range, which addresses the scalability and performance requirements of medium-size companies, government agencies and universities when it comes to building clustered server architectures or managing big databases, along with numerous other applications.

Equipped with high-speed connectivity and advanced networking and security features, OVH’s Infrastructure range of dedicated servers can be implemented for a diverse range of use cases, from media and video processing to high-performance computing, financial analytics and virtualization.

In order to maximize performance for users, the new range provides four configurations, priced from $147.99 to $339.99 monthly, each of which is designed for complementary use cases, to help companies build their own cloud infrastructure.

INFRA-1 and INFRA-2 servers are particularly well-suited to media/video processing and 2D/3D applications. They are equipped with Intel Xeon E-2274G and E-2288G processors, respectively, and the Intel UHD Graphics P630 technology, allowing for better graphics rendering. Both servers provide advanced security features, based on the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology, which completely separates the code being executed and the data being processed.

INFRA-3 servers enable the deployment of high-performance architectures for virtualization or containerization, as well as the ability to conduct complex analytics or build virtual offices. A brand-new configuration by OVH, INFRA-3 features the AMD Epyc 7371 processor, which is one of the industry’s most efficient 16-core CPUs, specifically designed for data centers.

Finally, OVH offers INFRA-4 servers to meet the execution requirements of complex workloads, and for the deployment of virtual environments and containers. As the only dual-processor configuration in the Infrastructure range, INFRA-4 is based on the second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

All servers in the Infrastructure range leverage the latest OVH Link Aggregation (OLA) technology, which makes it possible to aggregate the network interfaces of each server to increase its availability, while simultaneously isolating the server from the public network and any potential threats.

Like all OVH’s dedicated servers, the new range meets the most stringent security standards, such as compliance to ISO/IEC 27001 and includes all the usual features provided by OVH, such as built-in anti-DDoS protection, along with the ability to interconnect all servers and cloud services to OVH’s private network, vRack. In addition, the new servers leverage OVH’s robust network, including a public network bandwidth ranging from 1Gbps (standard) to 4Gbps (optional), and the vRack offering bandwidth ranging from 2Gbps (standard) to 5Gbps (optional).

OVH is happy to announce that today its OVHcloud Partner Program is now active in Canada. This partner program is aimed at organizations that support end customers in their migrations to OVH solutions, both as resellers and service providers in fields such as integration, facility management and consulting.

Globally, OVH has been offering two partnership tiers, each corresponding to different collaboration objectives to capitalize on OVH solutions.

The first tier is for Partner organizations wishing to sell or recommend OVH solutions to customers. Partners are provided with many tools to develop their own service layer based on OVH infrastructure, including:

• Non-exclusive partnership agreements
• Onboarding journeys dedicated to training on OVH solutions
• Visibility in the OVH Partner Locator, allowing end customers to search for OVH partners by geography and expertise area (available soon)
• Access to the OVH Partners Newsletter, providing privileged information about company news and partners benefits
• Video training courses through OVH webinars
• Access to the whole sales and technical literature for OVH solutions

The second tier is for Advanced Partner organizations that are looking to reinforce collaboration with OVH. Advanced partners are provided with:

• Periodical OVHcloud Partner Academy training programs around the sale, administration, and support of OVH solutions
• Access to dedicated support for Advanced partners, including individual annual target and performance monitoring and reviews
• A dedicated account manager
• Increased visibility in the OVH Partner Locator (available soon)
• Participation in partner roundtables, which share roadmaps and other feedback

As a core development of its partner program, OVH intends to add multiple touchpoints with its expert teams to further reinforce partner training and monitoring at a technical and commercial level, as well as for customer support management.

The OVH Group is happy to have such organizations as Capgemini and Deloitte among the first participants of its new Partner Program. Applications are already open on https://partner.ovhcloud.com/.

Each partner organization will be registered in the OVH Partner Locator, which will be available by the end of 2019. The OVH Partner Locator will help organizations and users search providers based on their expertise and geographical coverage, which can deliver an appropriate service powered by OVH technology.

Following Kubecon in May where OVH announced the deployment of Kubernetes on its dedicated servers through a partnership with Platform9, it is now Canada’s turn to have the service deployed on all OVH solutions. OVH already facilitated the use of Kubernetes on its public cloud via a free and fully managed offer through a partnership with Platform9, but now stand-alone customers can choose to install a Kubernetes distribution on all OVH solutions as well. OVH is the industry player that offers the most choice to deploy Kubernetes on its services.

The Kubernetes solution includes delivering a common standard among hybrid cloud and multi-cloud service providers. OVH has therefore decided to implement Kubernetes to ensure freedom of choice, reversibility and transparency for users, thus helping OVH come forward as the alternative provider on the cloud market.

While the OVH Managed Kubernetes Service is mainly designed for teams that have embraced the DevOps approach and operate on a public cloud, OVH has also listened to its clients who wish to take advantage of Kubernetes orchestration software on OVH dedicated bare-metal servers. To meet those clients’ expectations, OVH has teamed up with Platform9, a US-based specialized software vendor who offers the industry’s only fully managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service that works on any infrastructure – guaranteeing 99.9 per cent SLA anywhere, while eliminating the operational burden of managing Kubernetes at enterprise-scale.

OVH cater to all potential users of Kubernetes, including:

• Users who wish to get started by ramping up easily and affordably with OVH Managed Kubernetes Service® on OVH Public Cloud
• Users who prefer full hardware isolation or easy integration with their corporate IS through deploying a dedicated Kubernetes service managed by Platform9 on all OVH bare-metal servers, after subscribing to the Platform9 solution
• Users who want to deploy Kubernetes on a stand-alone basis on the various environments provided by OVH through a combination of public (OpenStack), private (VMware) or bare-metal infrastructure offerings to install their Kubernetes distribution of choice