ElasticStack Enables Resilient Clouds With Storage Clustering

ElasticHosts Ltd, a cloud platform provider, has announced new features enabling businesses to build and quickly deploy a scalable, resilient, pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure from low cost commodity hardware.

New features include improved storage clustering, which reduces hardware costs by eliminating the need for a SAN whilst still offering the same resilience. Another key update is the new Ajax user interface which makes deploying and managing cloud servers easier and faster.  

Following its launch in 2010, ElasticStack has been adopted across the world by service providers and businesses who have built public and private clouds within weeks. The platform has enabled significant cost savings by allowing businesses to run compute and storage on the same commodity hardware – eliminating the need for expensive SANs or dedicated storage clusters. However, the new release uses distributed block storage (network RAID) technology to offer improved storage redundancy and performance. This means that for the first time businesses can make their clouds as resilient as they would be with a SAN without the associated costs.

"Organisations traditionally used SANs to provide resilient shared storage for their clouds. They wanted to be able to move VMs between compute nodes and also to know that their storage was resilient to hardware failure. However, implementing a SAN or any dedicated storage cluster comes at an expense that ultimately increases the cost of your cloud," explained Richard Davies, CEO at ElasticStack. "With ElasticStack you’ve always been able to run both your compute and storage infrastructure on a single set of commodity hardware, with VMs still free to move between nodes. Now, you’ll also be secure that if any node goes down then all of your storage is already replicated elsewhere and your cloud will continue running. Essentially we are bringing all the resiliency benefits of a SAN to your cloud, without the need to invest in separate expensive storage hardware."

In addition to this, ElasticStack has also developed a new control panel which makes creating and managing cloud servers easier and faster. Built using Ajax, the control panel is still simple for any user to understand and use, and is now also more responsive. Businesses building ElasticStack-based clouds can also now make use of an increased range of payment, CRM and SMS options – meaning they can customise currency and pricing based on their region whilst also integrating ElasticStack into CRM systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

"All of these new features are designed to help businesses become more economically and operationally efficient," added Davies. "The new user interface makes self service much easier, while the improved cluster redundancy means organisations not only benefit from reduced hardware costs but now also have the resilience of an expensive SAN. Cloud computing should be on-demand, easy-to-use, truly scalable, cost-efficient, resilient and flexible. This new release delivers on all of these points and will enable both service providers and enterprises to build low cost, highly resilient clouds."

The ElasticStack cloud platform has supported ElasticHosts‘ own cloud servers in the UK and US since 2008. In 2010, the platform was made available to service providers and businesses looking to deploy private clouds. ElasticStack now powers production clouds on four continents, including US-based Open Hosting; Malaysia’s first public cloud service SKALI Cloud, and UK-based Serverlove.