The IT Nerd

 OVHcloud, the European cloud leader, further confirms its ambitions and support of the growing quantum computing ecosystem with the purchase of its first quantum powered machine to kick-off new efforts in the fields of research and development. Designed by French company Quandela, the MosaiQ computer is powered by a photonic processor.  

Doubling down on its efforts in quantum computing, the Group’s goal is to provide its research and development department with the right tools to experiment with a Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) based machine for various use cases. This comes in addition to the announcement, last summer, of a plan to offer quantum-based calculation as-a-service through several emulators, including Perceval, the programming framework developed by Quandela.  

Staying true to its commitment towards open ecosystems, OVHcloud actively supports development efforts in the field of quantum computing via its France Quantum conference initiative, where OVHcloud is a co-founding member, and through its Startup Program. The latter provides technical assistance as well as credits elevating innovation in quantum computing with startups, active both in the hardware and software fields. Over the years, this commitment already led to significant breakthroughs with Quandela’s early proof of concept effectively using OVHcloud infrastructure and Quandela’s first customers being able to connect to their QPU through OVHcloud. Hosted in OVHcloud datacentres in France (GRA) and Canada (BHS), Quandela’s Perceval notebook is also available here for OVHcloud Public Cloud customers so that they can discover quantum emulation. 

Marking a significant milestone and paving the way for a quantum ready future, Quandela’s system is expected for delivery sometime this fall. It relies on an upgradeable platform thanks to the use of photonics. With a QPU that can be reconfigured, the system will prove to be upgradable through new modules to quickly ramp up the overall computing capabilities.  

OVHcloud who has recently received the Nutanix EMEA Service Provider of the Year partner award, continues to enrich its Nutanix on OVHcloud solution by adding a BYOL offer in addition to existing packaged offerings. Current Nutanix customers and partners can now bring their Nutanix Cloud Platform* licenses onto OVHcloud dedicated and Nutanix-qualified High Grade HCI Intel servers benefiting from license portability and application migration transparency. Their Nutanix hyperconverged environment (HCI) is pre-deployed in just a few hours and ready to be used with their personalized infrastructure.

Nutanix on OVHcloud solution enables faster application migration from on-premises to the cloud all the while benefiting from OVHcloud infrastructure. Thanks to a low carbon footprint and best-in class PUE & WUE indexes, OVHcloud infrastructure stands out by its overall sustainability including a circular approach where the server lifecycle is thoroughly optimized. Furthermore, OVHcloud datacenters comply with high security and data protection standards.

With this new offering, OVHcloud can fulfill users’ needs, from addressing seasonal infrastructure peaks in-demand to building a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), all the while providing a cost-effective solution. Just like the Nutanix on OVHcloud packaged offer, the BYOL offer is comprised of 27 variants of dedicated and Nutanix-qualified High Grade HCI Intel processor-based servers and includes in/out traffic, which contributes to improved OPEX for significant savings when compared to non-HCI IaaS. 

Nutanix on OVHcloud solution is a scalable and ready-to-use HCI platform, in packaged offer and now also in BYOL offer, based on OVHcloud dedicated Nutanix-qualified Private Cloud infrastructures. It is now available for online ordering across EMEA and Canada with datacenters located in Canada, France, Germany and UK.

OVHcloud, the European Cloud leader and Bare Metal pioneer, announces the launch of Metal Instances. New to the Public Cloud universe, these instances leverage the tremendous compute power of Bare Metal servers, support an infrastructure as code deployment methodology and benefit from the flexibility and convenience Public Cloud is known for with a pay as you go model. 

In a typical Cloud-native environment, applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware so that they can scale thanks to the Cloud on-demand elasticity. This way, under the hood hardware becomes abstract and can be trimmed on the fly to answer specific peak periods. But not all apps are created equal, and some workloads might require dedicated hardware resources for their execution, whether it’s for control, isolation, or performance. Metal Instances are specifically designed to address this need offering on-demand availability and quick deployment times based on automated and standardized large-scale roll out through infrastructure as code made possible by OpenStack and Terraform native support. Last but not least, Metal Instances benefit from a pay as you go billing model (down to the hour) enabling customers to pay exactly for the compute capacity they consume. 

Full control of the hardware  

Metal Instances offer exactly what customers can expect from the Bare Metal forerunner: complete control of the hardware with access to the full CPU resources. Being run on 100% dedicated single tenant physical servers, Metal Instances support on-demand deploy through standard OpenStack API, benefit from Cloud automation capabilities and can be integrated into the full Public Cloud ecosystem of OVHcloud services. 

Bare Metal as a Service 

Metal Instances are built for a variety of workloads requiring specific hardware regardless of the purpose: performance, licensing, or low-level software customization. Thanks to Metal Instances, customers will benefit from a unique and flexible on-demand Cloud offer spanning across 3 different instances:  
 

• bm-s1 is powered by an Intel Xeon-E 2274G (4C/8T), 2x 960 GB SSD with hourly pricing of 0,5 euros, 
• bm-m1 is powered by an Intel Xeon-E 2288G (8C/16T), 2x 960 GB SSD with hourly pricing of 0,85 euros, 
• bm-l1 is powered by an AMD EPYC 7371 (16C/32T), 2x 960 GB SSD with hourly pricing of 1,45 euros, 

Each instance is teamed with a 1 Gbit/s guaranteed public network link and a 2 Gbit/s guaranteed private network. True to OVHcloud’s commitments when it comes to price predictability, the cost includes incoming and outgoing traffic. 

A solution that offers data protection and sustainability 

Metal Instances benefit from OVHcloud well known expertise in infrastructure, offering a trusted Cloud in environmentally friendly datacenters. With the highest security and data protection standards in the form of ISO 27001 certification and HDS, data are immune to extra-territorial laws. OVHcloud datacenters take advantage of its unique industrial model with a watercooling system that contributes in a sustainable Cloud allowing to reach best-in-class PUE/WUE indexes (see more data here).  

Availability 

Metal Instances BM-S1, BM-M1 and BM-L1 are available in Canada (BHS), France (GRA & SBG), Germany (LIM), United Kingdom (ERI) and Poland (WAW) and ready to click in less than 3 minutes.  

OVHcloud, the European cloud leader, is named as a “Major Player”  in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US48861822, November 2022). The IDC MarketScape evaluated 13 companies to assess strategies and capabilities.

According to the IDC MarketScape report, “OVHcloud has attractive and transparent pricing (e.g., it does not bill for API calls). It also has valuable service adjacency given it also offers dedicated private servers, web hosting, and hosted private clouds. This helps make it a one-stop shop for companies still early in their journey to the public cloud, as they can start the transition with OVHcloud using older deployment models and then maintain the same commercial relationship if and when they decide to move those workloads. ”

The report also noted, “OVHcloud’s roots as a European service provider also puts the company in the catbird seat for conversations about sovereign cloud and data residency, and indeed, it has baked these factors into its development approach for years. It has also made sustainability a strong focus for many years.

From a portfolio standpoint, the IDC MarketScape notes  the recent investments made in building out software services higher up the stack in areas surch as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, databases, and container orchestrations, while continuing to court partners focused on commercial and open-source software to build its ecosystem. 

You can download the relevant section of the report here.

Global Data Centre Cooling market is projected to double in the next five years and there is a growing demand by companies for cooling technology to better manage data. Advancements and emerging technology trends, such as liquid cooling, are compelling organizations to re-evaluate data storage needs and data centre designs. 

Liquid cooling techniques can benefit organizations by helping save costs in the long run along with addressing climate change andreducing energy consumption by at least 20%. Many companies, such as Meta and Microsoft, have migrated to liquid cooling models to bring about movement in the technology and business sphere.

A leader in this technology, OVHcloud has recently introduced a new Hybrid Immersion Liquid Cooling approach which is a game changer for businesses looking to reduce costs and manage their data more responsibly.

If you’d like to know more about this approach you can find details via this blog post here.

OVHcloud, the European cloud leader, offers a wide array of storage solutions to meet clients’ expectations and scaling needs. With the exponential growth in data volume year on year, the Cloud native architectures are essentially based on non-structured data. To meet demand, OVHcloud now offers a unique experience around different universes with its new High-Performance Object Storage and Standard Object Storage ranges.

High-Performance Object Storage: more features, more geographies

OVHcloud’s the High-Performance Object Storage solution, aimed at the most demanding apps, is based on S3 API and combines reliability and performance. Launched in early 2022 as a highly scalable solution, High-Performance Object Storage continues to evolve and now supports encryption and Object Lock. OVHcloud has also expanded its geographies with an additional French data center in Gravelines (GRA) and launch in North American markets, first with Beauharnois (BHS) in Canada, soon to be followed by two data centers in the US.

Standard Object Storage: the best price/performance ratio now S3 compatible

To address data storage needs with no specific performance constraints, the Group is launching OVHcloud Standard Object Storage. Now addressable through the S3 API, the Standard Object Storage offer is easy to implement and integrates seamlessly within the customer workflow participating in a fully reversible Cloud. At the core of OVHcloud storage strategy, Standard Object Storage stands out by its price/performance ratio with a monthly rate of 9.50 CDN per terabyte. With predictable costs in mind, the offer includes internal traffic to OVHcloud servers.

File Storage: evolution of the NAS-HA service

To meet the high availability storage needs of structured data, OVHcloud is evolving its file storage service with redundancy NAS-HA, which is especially valuable within virtualized environments or collaborative platforms. Integrated in a transparent form to the OVHcloud ecosystem, NAS-HA is fully managed and relies on OpenZFS technology with support for NFS and CFIS protocols. With a totally revamped user interface, NAS-HA is built upon SSD disks. Storage tiers range from 3 to 144 TB with a monthly rate starting at 228.99 CDN for 3 terabytes, without any traffic limitation (in/out). The offer is available in France (RBX and SBG) as well as Canada (BHS).

Cold Archive: secure and long-term data archive

Later this year, OVHcloud will launch its new storage service, Cold Archive – a hyper-resilient solution at a very competitive price. This service, working with Standard Object Storage, will allow businesses to store over the long term, while benefiting from maximum security and reliability. The service is based on:

• 4 mini data centers located across France with at least 200km of distance between sites. With each site interconnected, a permanent level of backup is guaranteed with redundancy mechanisms, to support every situation.
• A resilient tape-based archives solution, developed in partnership with IBM and Atempo. This will provide customers with an ultra-secure storage solution for the very long term with two advantages: a high level of security and low power as soon as data is written on tapes that become offline.

Performance focus: Block Storage adopts NVMe Over Fabric

Block storage is ideally suited for transactional processing as well as databases as it favours speed and adapts to scaling. One possible use case is the ability for customers of OVHcloud’s Managed Kubernetes services to store data from these microservices within the offer. 

The Block Storage offer will soon include a solution supporting NVMe Over Fabric. With the use of NVMe SSD and the NVMe protocol, it will provide best possible performance. Based on EXTEN developments, Block Storage Exten will benefit from performances higher than 50K IOPS and will be able to saturate 100 Gbps network connections. A Beta version is expected by the end of this year.

 OVHcloud, the European cloud leader and Bare Metal pioneer, expands its dedicated servers range with new solutions focusing on density for leadership performance when it comes to compute or storage capacity. With more choice in its range of performance-oriented servers, OVHcloud ensures that businesses can upgrade their infrastructure to tackle their most critical challenges around data.

The Advance-6 and Scale-7 Bare Metal servers benefit from AMD and Intel datacenter processors:

• New Bare Metal Scale-7 servers are equipped with 64 core AMD EPYC processors (Zen 3) that are ideally suited for the most intensive workloads related to High Performance Computing, virtualization or containerization. 
• Bare Metal Advance-6 servers are equipped with the third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor and its Intel SGX technology. It answers the specific needs of Confidential Computing for use cases like federated learning, noticeably found in the health sector. Here, data confidentiality is not only vital but preserved during training phases.

The new HGR-STOR-2 server is a unique solution for data storage and archiving, offering up to 1.4 Petabytes (1400 Terabytes) of capacity. Combining SAS disks, up to 102 in a JBOD chassis, and optional SSD, it offers low latency data access with high performance. Specifically tailored for large and institutional customers, the HGR-STOR-2 offer allows for the creation of a fully configurable data lake. It takes advantage of a high bandwidth private connection (100 Gbps guaranteed) so it can integrate to a cluster or other OVHcloud products and services. With absolute control over disks and volumes, customers’ specific needs will be met – from file archiving to backup of heavy databases.

OVHcloud’s new Bare Metal offer benefits from the advantages of dedicated servers when it comes to flexibility, control, performance, availability and unlimited bandwidth. This way, OVHcloud provides companies with the best possible support for their workloads, environments, and ad-hoc technologies, while guaranteeing predictable pricing.

Availability

Advance-6 servers are available from our datacenters in Canada and Europe.

The Scale-7 Bare Metal range is available in France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom while the HGR-STOR-2 offer is now available in France.

Following an early access period, OVHcloud is about to offer the Bring Your Own IP or BYOIP import service. As IPv4 addresses are scarce, it allows customers to import, via the OVHcloud Control Panel, their existing ranges of public IPv4 addresses to use as blocks of IP failover addresses. Thus, the move to cloud is made easier with less work required on network planning. Moreover, customers continue to benefit from the work they have already made concerning reputation management of their IP addresses. True to its principles, OVHcloud maintains reversibility; when the time comes, customers’ IPv4 addresses will be free of any vendor lock-in.

IP addresses are imported and segmented in block sizes ranging from /24 up to /19. OVHcloud also offers BYOAS to authorize importing customers AS numbers to further enhance the reputational aspect. The BYOIP service is available with Bare Metal Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud, Public Cloud products as well as vRack and IP Load Balancer.

With the convenience of monthly billing and no setup fee or commitment, the service will roll out in the coming weeks for all their datacenters under the condition of eligibility of customers’ IP addresses.

You can find out more here: OVHcloud Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP)

OVHcloud celebrated its 10th anniversary in Canada on Monday, June 6, in the presence of CEO Michel Paulin. To celebrate this milestone, partners and customers gathered at the Beauharnois data centre. Opened in January 2012 in a former aluminum smelter that has been completely revitalized, “BHS” now hosts nearly 90,000 servers, and has the capacity to eventually host three times that number. Beyond its size, it is one of the greenest data centres in the industry, powered by both Quebec’s hydroelectricity (one of the lowest carbon emitters in the world), and OVHcloud’s patented innovations, foremost among which is its water-cooling technology, which captures most of the heat emitted by the servers and has made it possible to suppress air conditioning from its facilities.

The Beauharnois site also houses one of the group’s two production plants. From the design and manufacture of servers to the reuse of components, which extends their lifespan to between 5 and 15 years, OVHcloud masters the entire value chain and contributes to the dynamism of a growing cloud computing industry in the Montreal region. As the first data centre in the OVHcloud portfolio outside of Europe, BHS ideally covers North America and Latin America, offering a safe and secure environment for hosting data that is immune from extraterritorial legislation.

Firmly focused on the objective of building a sustainable digital future, OVHcloud has found Quebec (powered at 98% by hydroelectricity) to be a privileged location to accelerate its decarbonization and reach Net Zero by 2030. This 10th anniversary was also marked by a high-level debate on the role of cloud computing and Quebec in optimizing the environmental footprint of digital ecosystems. This discussion brought together the expertise of OVHcloud, Atos, Hydro Quebec and Quebec Resources.

With 230 employees in Canada, spread between Montreal and Beauharnois, OVHcloud holds a unique position in the Canadian cloud market. By combining a European DNA, Canadian roots and a global footprint, OVHcloud offers a responsible and sustainable alternative to support businesses and public organizations in their digital transformation.

A major announcement concluded the event : the opening next year of a new OVHcloud data centre in Toronto (Ontario), which is part of the group’s “multi-local” strategy to get closer to its customers wherever they are.

Here’s some pictures from the event.

Atos and OVHcloud, the European leader in cloud computing, announce a partnership in the field of quantum computing to make Atos’ quantum emulator available “as a service” through OVHcloud offers. This European premiere will make quantum emulations technologies more accessible, thereby expanding the quantum technologies’ ecosystem. Research laboratories, universities, startups and large companies will ultimately have the opportunity to design quantum software and explore pioneering applications well ahead of the market.

By fostering the emergence of tomorrow champions, and by encouraging their international reach, Atos and OVHcloud are committed to contributing to the development of a coherent ecosystem ready for the advent of quantum computing technologies. Thanks to the two European leaders, both public and private players of this burgeoning ecosystem will have access to a quantum development environment wherever they are located, so they can develop and experiment “as a service” software bricks, ahead of the effective release of the first quantum computers.

By emulating a real quantum environment, this offering aims to reproduce the various approaches to quantum computation. Using the unique power of Atos’ SMP BullSequana X800 server, the Atos QLM achieves unrivalled simulation capabilities, covering three different quantum programming modes (the gate model, the annealing model and the analog model). When deployed within OVHcloud, users will be able to emulate circuits up to 38 qubits in double precision, and solve quantum annealing problems of up to 5,000+ qubits.

Scalable and interoperableAtos’ QLM enables the development of hardware-independent quantum software layers in program, annealing and analog modes, thanks to its unique and patented quantum compilation technology. This unique technology will also pave the way for the first applications that are optimized for first generation processors known as NISQ or Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum.

In choosing Atos technology as an anchor for its future developments, OVHcloud will be in a position to offer quantum computation solutions through Jupyter Notebooks, offering developers easy access. Designed according to free and open standards, the Notebook will offer a variable level of performances depending on the infrastructure, which will benefit from the work already carried out by the Artificial Intelligence teams at OVHcloud.

Concerned with strengthening the European digital ecosystem by embracing the next technological leaps, Atos and OVHcloud commit themselves to encouraging the adoption of this new paradigm to contribute to Europe’s technological sovereignty and to foster the emergence of new champions in this field.