Internap has announced its new "cloudy colo" capabilities in limited release for its Internet Labs customers. The new offering features a unified dashboard enabling control of all IT assets, and will be generally available at the end of the second quarter for customers in Internap's Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Dallas data centers.
The company expects to extend the rollout across its entire global footprint shortly. The new capabilities offer cloud-like remote visibility and management for colocation customers as well as hybridization of cloud and colocation footprints through a single customer portal.
The new portal is included as a standard component of the Internap offering, and provides a number of benefits to customers. These include granular visibility and management of the colocation environment, as well as increased control and reduction of costly visit to the data center or the necessity for remote hands type services.
“Both cloud and colocation will continue to play critical roles in meeting organizations’ diverse application requirements,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. “Internap’s universal customer portal bridges these typically distinct worlds with ‘cloudy colo’ capabilities, providing remote visibility into the colocation environment – unprecedented in data center offerings – and enabling the on-demand integration of colocation, cloud and other infrastructure with the simplicity of one trusted network, one contract and one support team.”
Initial features of the new colocation management portal include inventory management with integrated support tracking. This enables customers to review their entire colocation footprint as well as check the power status of devices and create alerts. They may also deploy stencils to enable device-level inventory tracking and management and may open support tickets instantly to receive feedback directly from the Internap NOC.
Additional features include power utilization monitoring and management; environmental and bandwidth monitoring; and on-demand provisioning of hybrid services. This lets customer use Internap's PlatformConnect service to utilize private network connectivity among multiple Internap services, including colocation, managed hosting and the cloud, within the same data center.
“Based on growing comfort with the automation offered by cloud services, organizations are seeking easier and faster access to their infrastructure,” said Carl Brooks, analyst, Internet infrastructure services at 451 Research. “As a result, there’s a strong opportunity for service providers to give customers access to elastic, on-demand resources with new kinds of controls, agility, ease-of-use, and infrastructure hybridization.”
Edited by
Ashley Caputo
