Business Cloud News - Cloud Computing industry analysis and insight

New version of ElasticStack eliminates SAN costs

28th July 2011

ElasticStack, the UK-based cloud platform provider, has today announced a range of new features enabling businesses to build and quickly deploy a scalable, resilient, pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure from low cost commodity hardware. ...................................................................................................................
Updates include improved storage clustering, which reduces hardware costs by eliminating the need for a SAN (Storage Area Network), and a new ‘Ajax’ user interface, which is said to make deploying and managing cloud servers easier and faster.

Following its launch in 2009, ElasticStack has enjoyed much success, expanding across the globe and deploying private and public cloud platforms for a number of key customers. The company received the accolade of a Cloud Computing World Series Award in 2010, when it was voted ‘Best Cloud Service’.

“Organisations traditionally used SANs to provide resilient shared storage for their clouds…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.”

Businesses building ElasticStack-based clouds can now make use of an increased range of payment, CRM and SMS options – meaning they can customise currency and pricing based on their region while 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.”

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.