Extract taken from ZDNet

Managed services provider Claranet has announced a hypervisor-agnostic rentable cloud service.

The Claranet Virtual Data Centre launched on Wednesday with one data centre in the UK and plans for five further facilities across Europe. The infrastructure-as-a-service cloud allows companies to rent and control storage, servers and networking.

Our offering brings together computing and network provisioning, which delivers lower connectivity costs and increased choice. Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre is built on four key principles: security and reliability… ease of network integration and a platform that is hypervisor-agnostic to facilitate migration.

said Michel Robert, Managing Director, Claranet UK

The cloud has a software orchestration layer that lets the infrastructure-as-a-service cloud host hypervisors of different types, Martin Saunders, Claranet’s Marketing Director, told ZDNet UK. Full technical details were not available.

It’s only reasonable to think that the hypervisor market will become more competitive as time goes by, so building hypervisor agnosticism into the platform is vital to ensure that we can give customers as much flexibility as possible in the future.

said Martin Saunders, Marketing Director, Claranet UK

The service presents customers with a management console that shows their overall cloud infrastructure and how it connects through to other parts of their IT stack. When all six datacentres are running customers will be able to set policies that keep data in any of the host countries, which will be London, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands

Companies ranging from Amazon through to IBM operate clouds with similar characteristics to Claranet. The London-based company hopes to differentiate itself with its hypervisor technology.

The cloud is priced according to use of IT assets — virtual CPUs (vCPUs), RAM and storage, rather than bandwidth — and changes according to the various bundles and deals you can select. A single server running Windows Server 2008 R2 with two vCPUs, 100GB of disk-based storage, 2GB of RAM and one public IP address would cost £80 per month or £0.18 per hour, if being used in a burst capacity, Saunders said.

Find out more

• To see the full article, go to: Claranet launches hypervisor-agnostic cloud
• To see the Press Release, go to Claranet launches next generation cloud service
• For more information about Claranet’s new cloud service, or to see a Video Demo, see Virtual Data Centre