OnApp Cloud v3.1 Offers Smart Server, Bare Metal Server Support

OnApp has released the latest version, version 3.1, of the OnApp Cloud mere months after the release of version 3.0. While it may be tempting to write off OnApp Cloud v3.1 as a small upgrade, it actually has a lot of new features to offer users, including support for dedicated smart servers and bare metal servers, as well as two new ways to automate cloud service provisioning: recipes and blueprints.

These new features combined expand the range of services that OnApp Cloud is able to offer, while bringing OnApp's cloud orchestration and management capabilities to even more areas of the data center. For the end-user, this means greater flexibility in deploying apps and data, the ability to enhance traditional servers with cloud features like autoscaling and failover, and of course the option of mixing public, private, hybrid cloud and dedicated servers through a single control panel.

Considering the fact that OnApp Cloud now reaches a third of the world, these improvements are an important addition to the platform.

“Service providers have to change from thinking about the cloud as another silo of infrastructure, to thinking about the value of their infrastructure as a whole,” said OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl in a statement. “With OnApp you can put workloads where it makes sense to put them — on bare metal, on a smart server or in a public or private cloud. You get a single pane of glass into the different services running across your infrastructure, and so do your customers. It’s how everyone gets the most out of legacy and cloud hosting.”

With smart server support, OnApp Cloud customers are now able to access a smart server on demand through the control panel. Smart servers work like a traditional dedicated server in that users have sole use of the physical hardware, but with the added benefits of automatic scaling, self provisioning and automatic failover.

Meanwhile, bare metal servers can be deployed and managed through OnApp Cloud. Since bare metal servers have no virtualization layer, customer apps and databases run straight on the hardware for optimal performance.

Finally, setting up these new servers can be assisted with recipes — a set of instructions that can be applied automatically to virtual machines, hypervisors, bare metal servers, smart servers — and blueprints, which allow for the deployment of a complete distributed application with just a single click.