Going Cloud: How to Squeeze More Out of Your White Space

Data center operators often wonder how to make more revenue within their existing facility. Partnering with a cloud services provider may boost their capacity and performance, without a lot of overhead.

“Every day we are talking to data centers about how do they make their white space a commodity? How do they make $20,000 or $30,000 per rack instead of $2,000?,” said Daniel Pfeiffer, vice president of Marketing & Partnerships, OrionVM, a turn-key, wholesale cloud infrastructure provider. The answer, he says, is leveraging a wholesale cloud partner.

Sheng Yeo, OrionVM CEO, said that as a turn-key, wholesale cloud infrastructure provider, his company is able to white label cloud infrastructure for multiple industries and applications, including customers in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, government and healthcare. “We have a cloud platform built for enterprise apps,” he said.

How to approach cloud and make the most of cloud services is one of the continuing issues faced by data center managers and operations, and the spring Data Center World event has several sessions on cloud and cloud options. Yeo, of OrionVM, will be presenting on the concept of wholesale cloud and how it fits for enterprises as well as within the service offerings of data centers. In advance of spring Data Center World Global Conference, Data Center Knowledge had the opportunity to discuss cloud strategy with Yeo and Pfeiffer.

Pfeiffer explained that OrionVM sees data centers as fundamental partners. “We cloud enable them and make them relevant to their customers,” he added.

“The hosting and managed services companies are interested,” said Pfeiffer. “They have explored AWS and Google and the “build your own” options. They are thinking how do we deliver capacity without diluting business? AWS requires that you change what you are doing. It is different from what you do.”

Yeo said that OrionVM’s cloud approach is “market tested and market proven.” The company currently has 450 global clients. At present, they use Equinix data centers in the Bay Area and have several facilities in Australia. They are looking to expand to the East Coast of the United States.

The future is moving towards larger cloud providers, said Yeo. “We are going away from the disparate retail cloud providers. It’s kind of like the ecosystem of data center providers, that has turned from thousands of tiny providers to fewer larger providers.”

Traditional Cloud Architecture (Graphic by OrionVM)

How OrionVM structures its technology stack. (Graphic by OrionVM)

Looking to the Supercomputing World for Inspiration

Our next generation, wholesale cloud is built a very efficient platform, said Yeo. “It is a faster platform, for example, our cloud storage is 25-30 time faster than AWS.”

The performance-focus comes from the world of supercomputing, said Pfeiffer. “The heritage of Orion VM is we looked at super-efficient computing for enterprise environments, and looked at the high performance computing (HPC) space,” Pfeiffer explained. “In the HPC space, they optimize on performance, getting it out of every dollar spent on infrastructure.”

The company has people on the team who come from the supercomputing background and couples their expertise with an enterprise-grade architecture. While they use Linux, there is a development team who wraps its own code around that operating system for software defined storage, software defined networking and virtualization functions.

“We have a development team in Sydney who have been working on this for the last five years. We have built it from the ground up. We are removing the client’s infrastructure costs,” Pfeiffer said.

To find out more about wholesale cloud services and the growing cloud ecosystem, attend the session by Yeo at spring Data Center World Global Conference in Las Vegas. Learn more and register at the Data Center World website.