Markley Launches Cloud, as Colo & Cloud Boundaries Continue to Blur

One-Summer-Street

The interior of a data hall inside One Summer Street, The Markley Group's date center hub in Boston. The company has introduced a new suite of cloud services. (Photo: Markley Group)

The Markley Group in Boston is offering cloud services, making it the latest facilities-centric provider going after hybrid customers. Markley is the owner of One Summer Street,  one of the prominent multi-tenant data center hubs serving Boston, so the news marks the continuing blurring of colo and cloud. 

"Our vision for Markley Cloud Services is built upon the same virtues that framed our company formation in 1992 – custom-design based on customer demand that paves the way for innovation and performance," said Jeffrey Markley, CEO of Markley Group. "MCS leverages our broad carrier network to offer customers the very best in connectivity and bandwidth so they worry less about cloud initiatives and more about how IT can impact their overall business goals."

One Summer Street is an 800,000 square foot  building located atop the intersection of key fiber rings serving the Boston market and New England region.  That's made it a popular data center destination for the region's IT operations, including Markley Group tenants like the Boston Red Sox, Harvard University, MIT, Boston Internet Peering Exchange and the New York Times. Markley's key offerings at One Summer include carrier-neutral colocation and managed services

Aimed at the Enterprise

The new Markley Cloud Services (MCS) is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) packaging a utility-style service for compute and storage with cloud management software atop. This offering is aimed squarely at the enterprise; the company utilizes VMware for its cloud, differentiating MCS from public clouds built on commodity servers and network hardware. The solution includes reserved RAM and enterprise-class SAN-based storage to ensure no oversubscription, and allows customers to configure their virtual machines (VMs), including virtual central processing units (vCPUs), memory, storage and network, as they choose and on demand.

The IaaS integrates with resources in dedicated colo cabinets and suites through private fiber optic connections via cross connects. By enabling a fully integrated hybrid computing environment, it allows current customers to gain efficiencies in cost and capacity planning from cloud in a secure manner. MCS allows businesses to develop or run applications in an on-demand cloud environment that accommodates seasonal workloads or development and testing scenarios, without being forced into making additional equipment purchases for short-term or unpredictable requirements.

"Markley focuses on the customer rather than taking the one-size-fits-all approach so common in most cloud environments," said Andy Shoemaker, principal consultant for JNS, a consulting services firm for IT organizations. "Recently, a client of JNS had an unusual project, and the only cloud provider willing to take on the challenge was the team at Markley. Markley Group’s hybrid cloud approach ensured their systems provisioned on-time, performed as expected and did so at a reasonable price."

Markley Group is usually pretty quiet due to its security focus, but another trend is occurring in the market; data center providers are opening up about what they’re doing. They’re no longer (figuratively) cold buildings, they’re becoming social and more marketing oriented. Last week the Markley Group held the latest in a series of data center summits offering presentations and panel discussions on industry trends.

It’s also important to note that some colo providers continue to avoid direct cloud offerings for of fear of stepping on customer toes. Facilities that have cloud providers residing in their walls often opt to partner with these customers rather than compete. There’s also offerings like Amazon Web Service’s Direct Connect that allow providers to address hybrid plays.