Here at Leaseweb we are always open to coming up with new solutions to technical challenges and this is where the pre-sales department comes in. My role as pre-sales engineer is to get a clear understanding of what a customer really wants to achieve and find a suitable solution with the available IT resources.
These days we have a lot of customers with many different kinds of workloads, most of which are perfectly suitable for a scalable and flexible Cloud environment. But let’s be honest, you can’t ‘cloudify’ everything (yet); some customers
have specific demands in terms of unique hardware or workloads
that run into problems when you try to virtualize them.
What is the Leaseweb definition of a ‘Hybrid’ Cloud?
Gartner, Inc. defines a hybrid cloud service as a cloud computing service that is composed of some combination of private, public and community cloud services, from different service providers.
Leaseweb’s definition goes a step or two further because we believe there are more ways to define a Hybrid Cloud solution. As an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, we see the demand for not only combining different Cloud services but for using a Bare Metal platform as well.
Customers have been using Bare Metal servers to run their workloads for a long time now. Whether for a simple website or an advanced ERP system, a bunch of Bare Metal servers does the trick. But having only Bare Metal servers does not give the flexibility and scalability that today’s (let alone tomorrow’s) clients demand.
For example, what happens if you have your database and backend processes running on an IBM iSeries server and your frontend application and website running on standard Intel CPU Bare Metal servers? You don’t have the flexibility and capability to spin up more frontend servers when demand increases during rush-hours as all the hardware is already fully occupied. Basically this means you are losing money as you don’t have the capacity to handle all requests. You wish you could sometimes ‘burst’ into the Cloud but, hey, that’s not possible… is it?
Leaseweb’s way of thinking provides the tailored services you need to overcome this challenge.
We have the option of combining the best of both worlds: We can combine your platform of choice with our Private Cloud infrastructure. Whether this is a Private Rack with Bare Metal servers or a co-location rack with some exotic hardware inside, we can interconnect it all to our Cloud to give you direct access to the resources you need.
Multiple options are available. We will supply you a Private Network (VLAN) on a 1Gbps or 10Gbps connection where all internal traffic is unmetered and free-of-charge. Alternatively it could be delivered as a fully redundant connection to ensure uninterrupted service should one component fail.
On our CloudStack Private Cloud platform, you would be given a ‘shared network’ consisting of a Private IP-range and VLAN number that stretches all the way into your Bare Metal platform. Or in more technical terms, an OSI Layer-2 connection is provided between both environments.
Connecting your Cloud Instances to the Bare Metal servers is then just a matter of adding this private network to the servers to let you unleash the full power of this Hybrid Cloud.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this subject at p.lonis@tech.leaseweb.com