07 July 2011 — 1 min read
More Than IaaS
As you know by now, nScaled provides infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) for enterprise customers. Gartner’s name for the product category we’re in is “cloud infrastructure-as-a-service”.
By now, most people are beginning to understand the differences amongst IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. A terrific illustration of the differences is here.
But it’s not so simple (it rarely is, is it?). Because what we provide to our customers is definitely more than IaaS. Here are some examples:
Hybrid architecture. When you think IaaS, you think either Public or Private cloud, and the marketing battle between proponents of the two models. Our attitude is that the only cloud model that actually makes sense for businesses is the hybrid model, combining on-premises appliances with on-demand cloud data centers. In our architecture, those two components behave like one single seamless cloud environment, all of it “inside the firewall”, all of it managed in a single console…
Cloud Console. Our proprietary SaaS application gives our customers a web-based admin interface to configure, manage, analyze and report on their entire nScaled cloud environment. Tasks like recovering a lost file, or booting and failing-over to a continuity (disaster recovery) server require one click, as opposed to15 or 20 manual steps. It’s not a rebranded or warmed over interface from another vendor. It’s software that makes nScaled simple to manage and secure.
Assurances. The image that public cloud has, especially after some recently publicized outages, is one of lack of reliability. The operating principle is, “You get what you pay for.” But nScaled goes way beyond this kind of cheap, commodity, caveat emptor approach. When we deploy customers, we test and certify all continuity servers that the customer sets up, assuring that they will work when called upon to do so. We also offer a strong services agreement that makes nScaled truly accountable to our customers.
In short, saying that nScaled is an IaaS vendor is true, and a useful quick categorization, but it leaves out a lot of the nuance that makes our solutions different, and, we think, better.
