The IT Nerd

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.

OVH has launched SSD and Cloud VPS, two new ranges of virtual private servers which push the standards. Showing performance of up to three times superior of that of previous ranges, VPS 2016 offers guaranteed bandwidth along with protection against DDoS attacks, assuring security and high availability for all uses.

The VPS offers professionals a dynamic platform, capable of increasing power which they can fully administer (root access). This is the progressive transition between the self-control of a dedicated server and the flexibility offered by virtualization which is becoming an indispensable product on the hosting market.

VPS SSD
With this new VPS, SSD disks are now an integral part of the OVH offer. Providing reduced latency and access times, VPS SSD shows improved performance of between 57% and 198% in comparison to the previous VPS Classic range.

Three configurations are possible, offering from 2 to 8 GB of RAM and from 10 to 40 GB of SSD capacity, all of which meet the growing needs of professionals in terms of storage. The offer provides customers the benefits of unlimited reinstallations of their virtual machine and the ability to reboot. VPS SSD is ideal for testing, hosting applications or monitoring.

VPS Cloud
The VPS Cloud range also offers the choice of three configuration. Offers start with 1 vCore, 2 GB RAM and 25 GB of storage and go up to 4 vCores, 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of storage.

Bandwidth is guaranteed at 100 Mbps, while NVMe Ceph disks make up a good portion of high available storage, without compromising scalability or fault tolerance.

VPS Cloud permits multi-protocol backups and offers snapshot services, while OVH provides an SLA of 99.99%, guaranteeing service stability. The VPS Cloud offer meets the business needs of e-tailers, freelancers and web agencies.

Integrated services make the difference
Each of the VPS 2016 ranges have several services in common, notably: anti-DDoS protection, management via OpenStack KVM, load distribution with Load Balancing IP, access to the OVH API, and simplified management. Soon they will benefit from improvements including: IP failover to ensure business continuity and IP geo localization to optimize local search.

To discover VPS 2016, visit www.ovh.com/ca/en/vps/

OVH announced that it now has 1,000 employees amongst its 16 subsidiaries throughout the world. To maintain its R&D strategy and support its customers, OVH is pursuing an active recruitment policy. More than 150 new employees have already joined the group since January and more than 100 more are expected for the second quarter.

To give you an idea of how fast they’ve grown, here’s a snapshot of their employee count:

• One in 1999
• Ten in 2000
• Five hundred in 2012
• Today – one thousand

OVH is proud to welcome a Canadian as its 1000th employee and a Frenchman as its 1001st, a real image of its international development on both sides of the Atlantic.

To support their growth, the group continues to reinforce its technical teams.

• Candidates for developer positions must be masters of different languages, like Python, Angular, Node JS, C, C++, Java or Go.
• Candidates for devops and system administrators, for their part, must have an excellent knowledge of the Linux environment, OpenStack and Docker platforms and the open source technologies of big data, storage, and especially data bases.

These positions are going to continue the development of the teams already in place internationally and in France.

OVH is also recruiting for its customer relations and support teams, seeking to fill technical and commercial consultant positions. To become familiar with the entire product and service lines marketed by OVH as well as its daily operation procedures, new recruits will undergo several weeks of training at the group’s Training Center. To recruit 300 people, OVH counts on the scale of its projects, its resourcefulness and its international ambitions. In April, the company reinforced its position in Canada with a 32.9 million dollar investment which will allow the creation of 150 jobs in Quebec over the next 2 years.

Furthermore, the group is taking more action in the direction of candidates, such as with the creation of a new website, OVH Careers, dedicated to recruitment where potential candidates can discover information regarding career opportunities.