The IT Nerd

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.

OVHcloud, the European leader in cloud computing, announces that it has acquired ForePaaS, a unified platform specializing in data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence projects for businesses. The 23 employees of the ForePaaS teams as well as its founders are joining the Group’s ranks as of today, to jointly build a set of solutions that will actively contribute to the deployment of OVHcloud’s growth acceleration strategy by enriching its Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.

Since inception in 2015, ForePaaS has distinguished itself with key accounts thanks to its integrated solution that allows to initiate, simplify, and accelerate the implementation of machine learning and data analytics projects. The ForePaaS suite addresses a very wide range of use cases to fully manage the data value-chain and create critical applications based on data for analysis, business intelligence and optimization of existing processes.

The ease of use and deployment of the ForePaaS solution has enabled the company to quickly develop an international customer base. In Europe, its expertise has been adopted by Klépierre and Gefco. In Asia, ForePaaS has notably entered a strong partnership with the Mitsubishi Research Institute (MRI), which will be further developed in the context of this operation.

This additional expertise will ultimately be integrated into the development environments that OVHcloud delivers to its 1.6 million customers worldwide. Building on a unified roadmap, developers will be provided with a complete suite of solutions to address the entire data value chain, from storage to database administration to artificial intelligence algorithms. The technical bricks of the ForePaaS analytics platform will thus be at the heart of OVHcloud’s value proposition in the Platform as a Service segment.

These new solutions will be fully integrated into OVHcloud’s value proposition, which aims at providing technologies with the best price-performance ratio in an open, reversible, predictable, and transparent environment.

In line with the recent acquisitions of OpenIO, Exten Technologies and BuyDRM, OVHcloud will pursue its strategy of targeted acquisitions to accelerate the deployment of PaaS solutions on an open and trusted infrastructure that provides unfettered sovereignty over data. To date, OVHcloud offers a catalog of more than 70 PaaS solutions and plans to expand it to 80 by the end of August 2022.

OVHcloud is proud to announce that its Veeam Enterprise solution – powered by OVHcloud infrastructure – is now available in Canada, offering Canadian businesses advanced capabilities to backup, replicate or recover their data in the cloud.

To enrich its portfolio of storage solutions dedicated to supporting businesses, this new offering allows OVHcloud’s Canadian customers, via the activation of a Veeam Enterprise license, to back up their applications in OVHcloud infrastructures or in their own data center. Compatible with physical servers under Windows or Linux, NAS or NAS HA storage, and virtual machines under VMware, the Veeam Enterprise solution reinforces data security for enterprises. It combines the industry-leading services of the European cloud leader with Veeam’s unique platform, entirely dedicated to guaranteeing business continuity.

Take control of your backups with complete freedom

Veeam Enterprise is designed for companies that want to save time and focus on their core business by outsourcing their backups to the cloud. Deployed at OVHcloud or in the customer’s on-site data center, backups are fully controlled by the company, regardless of the number of machines or their location. This control also extends to OVHcloud’s transparent and predictable pricing model, which is based on the actual consumption of the solution (pay-as-you-go). 

Built on the Veeam Backup & Replication technology, the Veeam Enterprise license complements two Veeam services also available from OVHcloud: Veeam Backup Managed, the backup as a Service solution for virtual machines; and Veeam Cloud Connect, which enables outsourcing backups from an existing Veeam Backup server to an OVHcloud data center.

Already available in Europe, the deployment of Veeam Enterprise is now available from the OVHcloud control panel in Canada and the APAC region.

OVHcloud and Nutanix, a global leader in hybrid multicloud computing, have partnered to offer Hosted Private Cloud powered by Nutanix. This pre-installed solution running the Nutanix Cloud Platform is ready to use in a matter of hours, running on 100% dedicated and secure OVHcloud infrastructure. The scalable, all-inclusive platform is designed for organizations that want to migrate their applications quickly and easily to the cloud or embark on a hybrid multicloud journey by scaling their applications to cloud for seasonal demands and taking advantage of disaster recovery in the cloud. Customers can leverage a common software management plane from Nutanix tying their OVHcloud solution to the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

This new offering enhances OVHcloud Private Cloud portfolio and provides organizations with the combination of the proven services of the leading European cloud provider and the Nutanix’s Cloud Platform built on its industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure software. The Hosted Private Cloud portfolio allows companies to leverage a dedicated infrastructure that scales alongside business needs. The use of a market standard such as Nutanix frees organizations from technical lock-in and provides continuity outside an OVHcloud environment.

The OVHcloud infrastructure meets the highest security and data protection standards, in line with HDS, ISO27001, HIPAA, and the GDPR. In addition, OVHcloud infrastructure can help customers maintain data sovereignty.

Nutanix and OVHcloud team up to innovate cloud migration

Hosted Private Cloud powered by Nutanix specifically addresses the needs of organizations that want to migrate their applications quickly and easily to the cloud. This helps them save time and improve productivity while remaining focused on their core business. The solution also fully integrates with a hybrid cloud strategy, securely tying cloud workloads to those that remain on-premises. Hosted Private Cloud powered by Nutanix is also suitable for businesses wishing to implement a disaster recovery plan, since its secondary infrastructure can be switched to the cloud in just a few clicks. Finally, SMBs and large enterprises that experience seasonal variations in business can leverage this solution to absorb their peak loads in the cloud without investing heavily in on-premise infrastructure.

The best of both OVHcloud and Nutanix, the respective leaders in private cloud and hybrid multicloud.

The Hosted Private Cloud powered by Nutanix solution is a competitive and unique all-inclusive offering that combines hardware, software, installation, and configuration, including network. It allows OVHcloud customers and partners to save installation and configuration time. With complete support for consumption-based pricing across the stack (Nutanix software and OVHcloud BareMetal hardware), it also enables them to streamline their expenses, and move from CapEx to OpEx. It consists of pre-deployed Nutanix clusters, exclusive to the Hosted Private Cloud powered by Nutanix offering, including:

• Pre-installed Nutanix software.
• Latest generation OVHcloud High Grade HCI Bare Metal servers for optimal performance.
• Configurations starting with a minimum of three-high performance nodes with built in resiliency. 
• Choice of hosting locations in North American data centers in Beauharnois (Canada) and European data centers in Roubaix (France) and Gravelines (France).
• Flexible, on-demand infrastructure with instant, fully automated access and provisioning. This allows organizations to easily scale up capacity as processing and storage requirements change.

Availability

Announced at Ecosystem Experience in November 2021, OVHcloud’s Hosted Private Cloud powered by Nutanix solution is available now in Canada and Europe. Prices start at $8120 per month, including the Nutanix software, with a minimum configuration of three nodes and a 24-month commitment. Like all OVHcloud products, this offering is based on a robust and sustainable infrastructure. It features an outstanding price/performance ratio in the industry and predictable pricing and allows organizations the choice of location so they can maintain control of their cloud strategy, security, and data. In addition, thanks to its vertically integrated business model, OVHcloud can offer its customers infrastructures that both meet its commitments to an ethical cloud and are sustainable as a result of resource efficiency and circular economy.

A new survey¹ commissioned by cloud service provider OVHcloud and conducted by Leger show that Canadians are becoming increasingly attentive to the way their personal data is handled, and most of them are opposed to it being stored outside of Canada. With the explosion of digital services and the growing importance of cloud solutions, Canadians were asked if they felt in control of their personal data. 8 out of 10 Canadians responded that they are concerned about its handling, especially when the data is stored predominantly by a handful of Web giants.

The survey also found that Canadians feel that the lack of targeted, standardized Canadian legislation governing the protection of personal information makes the concept of digital sovereignty – the degree of authority that a user has over her/his data and its processing – difficult to understand for them.

Canadians want control of their data

On the question of storage, the verdict of Canadians is clear: 78% of them refuse to have their data hosted outside of Canada. In the age of cloud computing, the question of data residency (where it is located and whether it is subject to be transferred internationally) gives rise to debate. Many organizations overestimate their cloud provider’s commitment to data sovereignty. While it is logical to expect a provider to respect the regulatory framework of the country where it is located, it must first and foremost prove that it is immune from extraterritorial legislation.

More than two-thirds of Canadian respondents feel constrained to use the services of the U.S. Web giants who have been able to implement their technologies and their rules, at the risk of locking users into an ecosystem of proprietary solutions (known as vendor lock-in). In turn, alternative models have emerged in recent years that rely on multi-cloud and the principle of interoperability between several solutions based on technological standards.

Greater awareness and transparency from Canadian government needed

In recent months, regulatory frameworks in Canada defining the protection of personal information have been strengthened. However, when asked about the latest privacy legislation, only 47% of Canadians say they trust the government. The delay in adopting the new federal privacy bill C-11 – titled the Digital Charter Implementation Act – may have something to do with this mistrust. Conversely, the adoption of Bill 64 in Quebec last fall seems to have had a positive effect, with 64% of Quebecers believing that their government is heading in the right direction to secure citizens’ personal data.

Inspired by the European regulatory framework, Bill 64 proposes to significantly raise the level of requirements expected from organizations in terms of transparency and consent. One of the key measures of Bill 64 is aimed at the supervision of cross-border data transfers, making it mandatory to assess privacy risks in the event of data transfers outside Quebec. 

However, despite a convergence of views between Canada and Europe on the regulatory front, Canadians seem to lack a reference point: twice as many of them would rather align Canadian legislation closer to an American model than to the European model. Tellingly, 50% of Canadians simply do not know how to define the Canadian regulatory model.

¹ Léger survey for OVHcloud, “Canadians and digital sovereignty”, December 2021

² Bill 64, An Act to modernize legislative provisions as regards the protection of personal information, passed on September 21, 2021

OVHcloud is combining its expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service with Platform-as-a-Service solutions to support the digital transformation of organizations by providing them with a ready-to-use toolkit.This accelerated integration of software technology is reflected in the launch of the Enterprise File Storage service, engineered in partnership with NetApp, which combines OVHcloud’s know-how with NetApp’s cloud storage management expertise.

OVHcloud is expanding its portfolio of cloud file storage solutions with an offering developed in collaboration with NetApp, a world leader in this field. Enterprise File Storage is designed to help organizations transition to the cloud by meeting their requirements for sovereignty, high performance and resilience, while ensuring seamless integration with the OVHcloud universe at a predictable price.

Enterprise File Storage is aimed at organizations with applications that have high operational requirements and need a highly available file storage service. The service is suitable for a variety of use cases, including organizations that are already cloud-based and want to facilitate sharing of enterprise data from different applications hosted on OVHcloud services, or organizations that are already running their own NetApp on-premise infrastructure and are looking to offload their workloads or begin their migration to the cloud.

Based on NetApp’s ONTAP file system technology and fully managed by OVHcloud, this all-in-one platform offers great ease of implementation while optimizing cloud storage costs, increasing application performance, and ensuring data protection and compliance. With Enterprise File Storage, customers get easy access to stored data and benefit from a flexible, scalable, and high-performance platform — with storage capacity from 1 to 58TB per service. The Enterprise File Storage service is appropriate for a wide range of enterprise environments and applications due to the use of the industry proven NFS protocol. It provides high performance — both in terms of IOPS and throughput — thanks to the combination of SSD technologies with NVMe caches.

With over two decades of expertise in digital infrastructure services, OVHcloud has developed an industrial model that preserves the technological and operational sovereignty of customers, while deploying environmentally friendly and resource-efficient technologies. Designed and engineered in the Group’s own data centers, all OVHcloud solutions guarantee total data reversibility and immunity to extraterritorial laws. The infrastructure operated by OVHcloud meets the highest security and data protection standards, in line with ISO27001 certification, as well as GDPR compliance. Like all of the European leading cloud provider’s solutions, Enterprise File Storage features an outstanding price/performance ratio in the industry and allows organizations to maintain control of their cloud strategy with predictable pricing and the choice of data location. In addition, because NetApp is an industry standard, Enterprise File Storage frees organizations from any technical lock-in and provides business continuity outside an OVHcloud environment.

Enterprise File Storage is already available in data centers in Roubaix (France) and Frankfurt (Germany). The solution will be deployed in a very short term in Beauharnois (Canada), then will be rolled out in further geographies.

OVHcloud is reinforcing its data storage solution portfolio by providing its customers with a new storage offering for unstructured data. High Performance Object Storage combines high performance and scalability with a transparent and ultra-competitive pricing model. It meets the requirements of Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and is also suitable for e-commerce and streaming platforms. 

The amount of data being created is growing exponentially each year, and by 2025, 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured data. As organizations adopt a cloud-native approach in order to modernize their information systems or build new applications, they face many challenges, such as managing the complexity inherent in unstructured data, storing massive amounts of data while controlling their associated costs, and delivering the performance required by applications that use this data.

High performance to meet business requirements

High Performance Object Storage offers organizations high-performance, highly scalable storage at a competitive price. Specifically designed for Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC) applications that require high throughput and low latency, the solution is equally well suited for static data such as documents and media contents.

High Performance Object Storage can store massive amounts of data and scale up quickly to one petabyte, at anoutstanding price/performance ratio. The pricing model is completely transparent to the customer: $39 per terabyte per month, $0.015 per outbound gigabyte, while API requests and private outbound traffic are included without any extra charge.Easy to access, the solution is fully available through the S3 API and the OVHcloud Customer Space. 

A storage solution that maintains data sovereignty and privacy

With over two decades of expertise in digital infrastructure services, OVHcloud has developed an industrial model that preserves the technological and operational sovereignty of customers, while deploying environmentally friendly and resource-efficient technologies. Designed and engineered in the Group’s own data centers, all OVHcloud solutions guarantee total data reversibility and immunity to extraterritorial laws. The infrastructure operated by OVHcloud meets the highest security and data protection standards, in line with the ISO 27001 certification, as well as GDPR compliance. Like all of the European leading cloud provider’s solutions, High Performance Object Storage features an outstanding price/performance ratio in the industry, and allows organizations to maintain control of their cloud strategy with predictable pricing and – eventually – the choice of data location.

Availability

High Performance Object Storage is already available in the Strasbourg data center (France). The service will be deployed in Gravelines (France) by April 2022. It will be available internationally in Canadian-based and OVHcloud US’s data centers in May 2022.

OVHcloud, Europe’s leading cloud service provider, is increasingly focusing on its Data Center as-a-Service offering as a response to the growing demand from companies for a hybrid cloud that provides flexibility, security, and scalability. OVHcloud is addressing these needs by anchoring the principles of digital sovereignty, cost predictability and interoperability, the pillars of the company’s vision.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the importance of a hybrid cloud model that balances cloud-centric capabilities distributed everywhere and used as-a-service with the control of a legacy environment. For organizations that were on the path to cloud adoption, it was relatively easy to quickly scale up cloud-based resources for employees who suddenly found themselves operating remotely, as well as applications to easily meet business needs. At the same time however, resistance has emerged from some on the use of the public cloud, particularly regarding the localization of resources and the requirements of regulatory compliance and security for sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and others.

Helping Canadian companies navigate the challenges of hybrid cloud

A recent survey shows that more than half of Canadian organizations rely on hybrid IT environments and plan on spending more to combine on-premise and cloud deployments in order to choose the right environment for each workload.  With the aim of overcoming concerns about cloud usage and ensuring better interoperability between the public cloud and customers’ on-premises infrastructure, OVHcloud has introduced the Data Center as-a-service (DCaaS) offering, a new generation of solutions that bring together the hardware and software assets of a cloud provider that can be deployed in any data center.

DCaaS is a pre-integrated cloud services system offering a pool of shared resources dedicated to a single enterprise. Only accessible and fully controlled by the enterprise, this solution ensures a sovereign, trustable and sustainable environment to handle datacenter operations.

Local dedicated cloud-as-a-service is an important development in enabling hybrid cloud environments for organizations to integrate and orchestrate workloads between dedicated and public clouds based on the characteristics and business impact of different workloads. An IDC survey conducted in August 2020* shows that 17% of Canadian organizations were migrating their core business applications to the cloud, indicating that a modern on-prem environment is still at the heart of their digital transformation strategy.

More freedom to scale in a secure, transparent environment

Based on OVHcloud’s open standards and latest technologies, DCaaS meets all the criteria to ensure smooth cloud deployments, including agility, scalability, and the consumption model that users expect, as well as self-service provisioning and simplified implementations for end users through preconfigured and integrated workflows. This dedicated on-premises cloud solution ensures the level of control, management and performance traditionally associated with legacy infrastructures, providing at the same time cloud-like capabilities meeting the highest standards in terms of governance, compliance and security. 

Also benefiting from OVHcloud’s vertically integrated model in the design and management of their own datacenters, organizations have the flexibility to deploy their infrastructure on-premises or within a dedicated private zone in any of OVHcloud’s datacenters. From a single rack in one OVHcloud datacenter to multiple on-premises datacenters, the DCaaS offering ensures the modularity that Canadian companies are looking for to optimize their hybrid cloud journey. They will also experience usage-based cost predictability and the assurance of regular upgrades of their environment with the latest, best-of-breed technologies used by OVHcloud. 

To learn more about DCaaS, download the IDC InfoBrief for free: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ca/enterprise/idc-InfoBrief-dcaas/

With six new DBaaS solutions available, OVHcloud now offers its customers one of the largest DBaaS portfolios on the market. This acceleration was made possible thanks to a partnership with Aiven, the European software company that combines the best of open-source technologies and cloud infrastructure.

With its six new Database-as-a-Service solutions (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, Apache Kafka Mirror Maker, RedisTM and OpenSearch) along with 5 other solutions (Apache Cassandra, M3, M3 Aggregator, Grafana and Apache Kafka Connect) all available in spring 2022, OVHcloud is offering its customers the most comprehensive choice of managed databases.

Through its extensive Public Cloud Database portfolio, OVHcloud supports the adoption of a company’s Managed Platform-as-a-Service and facilitates the acceleration of their transformation as part of application modernisation, the implementation of a native cloud strategy, or the extrapolation of data through a complete data pipeline, based on artificial intelligence.

OVHcloud offers open-source databases, allowing its customers to benefit from the latest updates and innovation from user communities. These sustainable solutions, standards and supported by the open-source community guarantee portability and reversibility, to avoid any vendor lock-in.

DBaaS solutions benefit from the advantages fundamental to the OVHcloud range: an accessible solution, an unparalleled price/performance ratio, predictable pricing and data location choices so you are not subject to extraterritorial laws.

With a strong presence in Canada since 2011, OVHcloud is a global player and Europe’s leading cloud provider operating over 400,000 servers within 33 data centres across four continents. For 22 years, the Group has relied on an integrated model that provides complete control of its value chain: from the design of its servers to the construction and management of its data centres, including the orchestration of its fiber-optic network. This unique approach allows it to independently cover all the uses of its 1.6 million customers in more than 140 countries. OVHcloud now offers latest generation solutions combining performance, price predictability and total sovereignty over their data to support their growth in complete freedom.

Headquartered in Helsinki and with hubs in Berlin, Boston, Paris, Toronto, Sydney and Singapore, Aiven provides managed open source data technologies, like PostgreSQL, Kafka and OpenSearch, on all major clouds. Through Aiven, developers can do what they do best: create applications. Meanwhile, Aiven does what they do best: manage cloud data infrastructure. Aiven enables customers to drive business results from open source that trigger true transformations far beyond their own backyard. Most recently, Aiven achieved a $2B unicorn valuation and has now raised $210M total funding backed by its investors Atomico, Earlybird, First Fellow, IVP, Lifeline Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and World Innovation Lab.