Daniel Robinson| V3
Peer 1 Hosting has taken the wraps off mission critical cloud computing services for enterprise customers, offering availability up to 99.999 percent (five nines) plus built-in disaster recovery from its global network of datacentres. Announced at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Mission Critical Cloud is based on Tier 3’s cloud computing platform, which itself uses VMware technology but with its own orchestration and management layers.
The result is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering capable of meeting reliability requirements for hosting enterprise applications in the public cloud, Peer 1 claims.
“We wanted to provide our customers with choice in respect to cloud. If I’m an enterprise user, I want an environment that mitigates risk, and has more robust service level agreements of four or five nines,” Peer 1’s worldwide GPU cloud specialist Richard Rivera told V3.
The firm said that Mission Critical Cloud offers high availability by building in local mirroring of virtual infrastructure, plus replication to a second Peer 1 datacentre for redundancy.
“In the event of a failed node or failed hypervisor, that stack would quickly be up and running again in another location,” Rivera said.
However, this capability is only offered in the Enterprise version of the service, not the Standard version. The Enterprise version also offers an SLA of five nines, while the Standard is set at four nines.
Customers can also choose a specific datacentre location from Canada, the UK or Germany for hosting their applications.
Mission Critical Cloud offers customers a self-service portal, with the ability to provision infrastructure using Blueprints. These templates contain everything required to stand up an enterprise application, including specifications for a virtual server or group of servers and the supporting infrastructure, according to Rivera.
However, with recent high-profile outages experienced by the likes of Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises are likely to be wary of putting any more vital infrastructure into the public cloud.
But Peer 1 said it is in a different position to those cloud providers, as it owns the end-to-end infrastructure.
“We own and operate our own FastFiber 10Gbit/s wide-area network and the datacentres we reside in, so we are able to manage the upstream and downstream of that entire network, which is how we can offer those very strong SLAs,” Rivera said.
Peer 1 is also looking at offering hybrid environments, combining the public cloud with dedicated physical infrastructure for hosting the most critical elements of a customer’s infrastructure, such as clusters of SQL servers, he added.
The Peer 1 Mission Critical Cloud is available under pay-as-you-go pricing, but exact tariffs have yet to be released by the firm.
