Internap Launches OpenStack-Powered Public Cloud

Internap has become the latest data center services provider to launch a public cloud service built using the open source cloud infrastructure software OpenStack. The company has offered public cloud services before, but the new AgileCLOUD platform ensures better operability with other OpenStack-based clouds through the OpenStack API.

"We’ve had a cloud offering for some time, but with this step we’re taking a different approach by going the open source route," Adam Weissmuller, director of product management for cloud and hosting at Internap, said. "We’ve had the AgileCLOUD platform, but it was built on a proprietary API. If you think back several years ago, there were very few standards. Going from provider to provider often required learning a new language, making it difficult to move. With OpenStack it's an interoperable cloud."

Weissmuller noted the company had customers on the platform's beta version for several months prior to the general-availability launch. "We were getting live feedback throughout the process," he said. "We have production workloads on day one with this offering."

The service is currently hosted at Internap’s Dallas data center, but the company plans to roll it out worldwide – including eastern and western U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific – over the remainder of 2014. Bare-metal configurations will be available during the summer.

AgileCLOUD is one of the first cloud services available through the OpenStack Marketplace, announced this week at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, Ga. Exposing the API is a key criteria for inclusion in the OpenStack Foundation’s new public cloud marketplace, which serves as a repository of OpenStack products and services.

The public cloud is just a piece of a wider portfolio of Internap services, which also include colocation, managed services and bare-metal servers.

Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and hosting at Internap, said building the offering on OpenStack enabled the company to integrage core features, such as hybridization. " The result is an advanced open cloud computing solution that allows customers to meet a full range of workload needs, from large-scale, distributed environments to real-time, data-intensive applications,” he said.

There are several performance tiers and custom configurations on AgileCLOUD. Customers choose from three configuration series depending on performance requirements: two based on virtual instances and a bare-metal option.

Networked (persistent) storage is based on an SSD-imbued SAN. Each volume has a guaranteed number of IOPS to prevent the “noisy neighbor” problem, which occurs when one application or virtual machine hogs bandwidth and affects performance for others on the physical host server.

Internap also provides a performance optimization service, called Managed Internet Route Optimizer,  which analyzes network characteristics and continuously adjusts for highest traffic performance.

Internap has been a contributor to the OpenStack project since 2010.  The company says it has contributed more than 160 OpenStack commits to date and is among the top 30 contributors to the Essex, Folsom, Grizzly and Havana releases.