Claranet Virtual Data Centre

A new cloud computing service based on the delivery of enterprise-class services, integrating computing and network provisioning, has been launched by Claranet Limited, the managed services provider.

The new solution – Claranet Virtual Data Centre – has been developed to meet the needs of companies looking to migrate their internal IT infrastructure to the cloud. The new service addresses the key proposition of cloud deployments: the ability to control costs, scalability and speed of implementation.

Michel Robert, managing director, Claranet UK, stated: "We are delivering to the market a solution that is built entirely around the needs of the user. Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre is built on four key principles: security and reliability, based in the country of the customer‚s choice all with access to the first of up to six European nodes, with ease of network integration and a platform that is hypervisor-agnostic to facilitate migration."

"Our cloud proposition is based on the highest levels of certification, and the leading technologies available on the market. Crucially, our offering brings together computing and network provisioning, which delivers lower connectivity costs and increased choice. Furthermore, our cloud proposition delivers not only a reliable and sophisticated alternative to the market, but one that means high-performance cloud provisioning is now available to companies of all sizes," he continued.

Built on an enterprise-grade infrastructure, the Claranet Virtual Data Centre offers users resilient hosting, guaranteed resources (vCPU, vRAM and vStorage), and persistent storage. Hosted in tier-3 equivalent data centres, the service delivers guaranteed service levels ensuring high availability, low network latency, and 24×7 local language support.

The Claranet Virtual Data Centre enables organisations to migrate to the cloud via its self-service portal. This new, single portal enables end-users to manage both dedicated and shared cloud platforms from a ‘single-pane-of-glass’. Users are therefore able to merge existing cloud servers into logical applications and template them for deployment via drag-and-drop interface, within minutes. In addition, the cloud portal delivers server and resource provisioning ‘on-the-fly’, as well as an ability to migrate from an existing virtual server platform into the Claranet Virtual Data Centre.

Users‚ applications and data are always in their chosen country, which reflects data sovereignty and data ownership concerns amongst end-users. These are ranked as the biggest concerns for companies of all sizes according to research carried out by Claranet. Its research, conducted in October 2011, found that 85% of organisations stated that data security was the biggest risk factor in migrating to the cloud.

The research also found that one third of a sample of IT decision-makers stated vendor lock-in was a major risk when considered cloud migration.

"Our relationships with both Microsoft and VMware truly sets us apart from the majority of suppliers in the market. Being able to offer a differentiation in service and no vendor lock-in via our hypervisor-agnostic strategy, we believe we bring a credible solution to companies looking to leverage the opportunity that cloud services can bring," continued Michel Robert.

"Many businesses start out by just using the cloud for web hosting a mass-market service provides everything they need. But as these businesses become more comfortable with the cloud, they often want to reap some of the other benefits – and place business applications in the cloud. However, these may need much higher availability and have specific data protection requirements that the mass-market cloud may not meet," Michel continued.

"On the other hand, enterprise cloud is designed to work with enterprise-grade IT systems, which means it is more resilient, and compatible with a wider range of IT components. The Claranet Virtual Data Centre is a different proposition, delivering a network-integrated cloud – so that users can connect to their cloud solution with their private wide area network without using the public internet for connectivity," he concluded.

About Claranet
Founded in 1996, Claranet has evolved from being an ISP into an MSP with annual revenues of around £72 million. It has more than 500 employees, with footprint in six countries and although Claranet has grown internationally, the focus has always been on local service, out of local offices, using local data centres.