CenturyLink Boosts Cloud Offerings With Flash, Beefier Instances

CenturyLink is boosting its cloud portfolio with a beefed up cloud and an expanded data center footprint. The company is introducing Hyperscale, a high performance compute and flash storage service for web-scale workloads, Big Data and App development. The company also announced it is expanding its public cloud data centers from nine locations to 13 in the first half of 2014.

Starting in March, new cloud data centers in Santa Clara, California and Sterling, Virginia will be online and ready for customer use. The company is expanding its European footprint, adding locations in Paris and the London metro market, expected to come online by the second quarter of 2014. All of CenturyLink’s cloud services, including the new Hyperscale, will be available in all of these new locations. The increased footprint helps customers geo-target their solutions better.

Hyperscale Beefed Up Server Instances

Hyperscale is a self service offering that allows developers to create and run mission critical applications in the public cloud on beefed-up server instances. Hyperscale addresses the new breed of web-scale applications and Big Data needs.

“New applications are crucial to delivering a competitive advantage for enterprises, and Hyperscale is the ideal service for these workloads,” said Jared Wray, CenturyLink Cloud chief technology officer, CenturyLink Technology Solutions. “CenturyLink continues to bring developers and IT together with this new capability. Developers get self-service and lightning-fast performance for popular NoSQL platforms, and IT can easily use our cloud management platform for governance and billing.”

Hyperscale consists of 100 percent flash storage for increased IOPS (input/output per second) performance. IOPS is usually the point where cloud performance suffers, so a lot of providers have been turning to Flash storage to solve this problem. The company claims that users will consistently see performance at or above 15,000 input/output operations per second for a diverse range of workloads. Typical use cases for Hyperscale are intensive web-scale architectures built on Couchbase, MongoDB and other NoSQL technologies.

The high performance server instances are also ideal for Big Data applications, and are complementary to CenturyLink’s existing Big Data Foundation Services, which offer a series of options and managed services to address a broad set of enterprise use cases.   Hyperscale is an important piece in a portfolio that includes public cloud, colocation, managed services and network solutions.