Toronto’s Q9 Networks Inc. is expanding its offerings with the launch of its dedicated private cloud service. It’s powered behind-the-scenes by Nutanix and built on Q9’s enterprise grade elastic infrastructure service that enables underlying server and storage to scale with cloud applications.
Strahan McCarten, Q9’s senior vice president of product and strategy, said the dedicated private cloud offering allows customers to have a “truly private” infrastructure and ensure 100 per cent Canadian data residency. Customers can also pay-as-they-go, rather than make capital investments in their own infrastructure.
Q9 is Canada’s largest data centre provider, and has been primarily known for its collocation services over the past 20 years, said McCarten. The introduction of dedicated private loud services follows the introduction of its customizable bare-metal servers last year.
What different about this latest offering that leverages the Nutanix platform is that it’s “point and shoot” for lack of a better term, he said. Unlike Q9’s bare-metal server — which is aimed at customers who already have the management and virtualization software of their choice in place and are just looking for more capacity — the new dedicated private cloud service is for companies who want management software layer chosen for them.
The offering is part of Q9’s “provide and enable” strategy, which allows these customers to simply log in and connect their collocated infrastructure to ensure low latency and Canadian data residency, said McCarten. They can also connect public cloud services to their collocation services.
Customers for this new offering tend to be medium-sized companies so far, he said. “When they procure cloud they are going after a level of automation they don’t want to build or can’t build in-house.”
Q9 chose the Nutanix platform for its fast performance and its ability to easily scale, said McCarten. It also combines computing, storage, and network in nodes that are easy to add and move. “We can move and repurpose nodes for different customers.” Ultimately, he said, storage, compute, and networking are a means to deliver applications. Typical workloads for the dedicated private cloud service include virtual desktop infrastructure, big data, and installed Azure stacks.
In particular, said McCarten, the Nutanix platform simplifies disaster recovery and replication, and allows for cluster replication and DR locally, regionally or nationally across Q9 facilities. While public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure provide a lot of tools for DR and replication, they are complicated, he said, and Nutanix offers it in one click.
In addition, McCarten said, existing Nutanix customers replicate all or some of their existing clusters over to Q9.
“It’s a nice option for both new and existing Nutanx customers.”
