According to Nebulon, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are focused on developing new services and revenue sources, reducing service delivery costs by optimising infrastructure and operations, and maintaining high customer satisfaction by minimising availability risks and security threats. Achieving these goals can be a challenge for those CSPs deploying single-use hyperconverged infrastructure (HVI) technology versus a fully open platform providing a common experience across hypervisors and bare metal use cases. HCI, says the company, also puts significant pressure on service costs because its data services consume up to 25% of server resources — effectively one-in-four servers and related software purchases are lost to HCI overheads. In addition, both HCI software updates and server operating system maintenance take critical storage resources offline placing data and committed customer service level agreements at risk.

“Sixty percent of enterprises have repatriated at least one application back from public cloud infrastructure services to their on-premises data centres due to previously unforeseen reasons, including cost, security, and compliance,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director at Enterprise Strategy Group. “As we see organisations become more strategic about which workloads are in which locations, they will increasingly expect the same experience and operational simplicity no matter which data centre they choose. Nebulon delivers that consistent, simple experience for both enterprises and service providers and its timing could not be better.”

Nebulon’s smartIaaS solution is described as a blueprint that helps CSPs drive incremental revenue growth by provisioning, monitoring and maintaining application infrastructure in both the CSP data centre as well as that in the customer’s own data centre via a single API.

Sinclair adds, “With this capability, CSPs can easily leverage their orchestration platforms to deliver new multi-cloud services with a common cloud-like experience for their clients. CSPs can also take advantage of additional Nebulon solution blueprints for bare-metal- and Kubernetes-based services, extending their offerings beyond hosted virtualisation services.”

UK-based cloud service provider Inca Cloud, has chosen the Nebulon smartIaaS solution as a part of its new multi-cloud service, WSO by Inca. With WSO, Inca can provide enterprise clients with a single platform to provision and maintain workloads in the public, hosted or private cloud data centre. The public cloud is a ‘rental model,’ and while appropriate for certain use cases, is two to four times more expensive when compared to other alternatives.

With WSO by Inca, monthly costs are completely transparent for public cloud, hosted and private data centre deployment options. This service also provides an extensive library of machine images, as well as a common cloud-like experience independent of data centre type. With the help of Nebulon smartInfrastructure, Inca is able to deliver this breakthrough, yet cost-effective, multi-cloud service to its customers.

“Inca is pioneering a multi-cloud service model for enterprises unlike anything offered in the industry today,” said Damon Dance, Director of Sales at Inca Cloud. “With a Nebulon-based Supermicro foundation for the hosted element of our multi-cloud service, we are able to bring to market a ‘smart’ vision that would have been impossible to deliver just a couple of years ago. Customers can now retain the flexibility and operating model which make the public cloud so appealing whilst regaining the control it removes, and improving both predictability and cost advantages for their cloud deployments.”

“In order for cloud service providers to not just survive, but thrive and lead in a competitive market, they need the ability to attack growing trends with differentiated solutions,” said Siamak Nazari, CEO at Nebulon. “There is a massive opportunity for CSPs to offer solutions, which provide a more cloud-like experience for enterprises repatriating or retaining workloads in private or hosted data centres, and I am thrilled that our smartIaaS-based Inca solution will allow customers to do just that.”