CloudCentral is proud to announce that we are expanding our cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to the new Equinix SY3 International Business Exchange™ (IBX) data centre in Sydney. CloudCentral will commence offering services from the Equinix SY3 data centre on the 1st of August 2011. It will continue to provide services from its existing Canberra availability zone located in the TransACT data centre.

CloudCentral’s multiple availability zones enable customers to deploy highly available solutions across locations. Having a presence in Canberra and Sydney will also provide CloudCentral customers flexibility to locate latency-sensitive websites as close to their target customers as possible.

The new alliance and cloud computing location differentiates CloudCentral from its competitors, especially those without an Australian data centre presence. CloudCentral’s dual site offering is in stark contrast to existing competitive offerings. It is important to us that our availability zones are located in secure, reliable and network-rich data centres and operating two data centres is an integral part of our business continuity strategy.

From August 1, CloudCentral will be the only provider of true pay-as-you-grow, on-demand cloud infrastructure services from multiple Australian eastern seaboard data centres that are on the whole-of-government Data Centre Facilities Panel with a guarantee that all data will be retained within Australia.

CloudCentral will offer customers connectivity into the Sydney availability zone at speeds of up to 10 gigabits/second via agreements with several leading Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Today I delivered a presentation about open cloud standards, what they are, and why they matter.

Please take a look at our slide deck and feel free to send us any questions, comments and other feedback you might have.

We have also announced that we are launching our OpenStack Compute API for our cloud compute service. This makes Cloud Central the first provider in Australia to implement an open cloud standard, and also the first OpenStack API compatible cloud in Australia!

Check out the sides here:

We’re currently hard at work developing our new website which will be released shortly. In the meantime, please take a look at the following presentation we’ve put together that covers Cloud Central’s history, our people, our technology, and service offerings:

CloudHarmony recently conducted storage performance benchmarking on a number of cloud infrastructure providers including Cloud Central.   Cloud Central’s storage results were rated very good, please take a look for yourself at http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in-cloud.html

Cloud Central’s storage architecture features a highly reliable, performant and secure Sun storage hardware, running the ultra scalable ZFS filesystem.  We leverage multiple gigabit connections and iSCSI in our architecture, with redundant power, network and SAS connections in the architecture.

We also use enterprise grade Intel Solid State Disk (SSD) within our storage architecture.  SSD’s enable us to create a hybrid storage pool, enabling very fast read / write IO.  This makes Cloud Central Cloud Servers especially great for transactional systems (eg databases) that require fast IO commits.

Many thanks to Andre Leibovici from MyVirtualCloud.net for this video showing how to create a new Cloud Central Cloud Server, add a public IP address, then permit remote access to the newly created Cloud Server.

CloudCentral Server Provisioning Evaluation from Andre Leibovici on Vimeo.

I participated in an interview with Andre Leibovici’s APAC Virtualisation Roundtable back on Feb 9 2010, unfortunately I had not had the time to post it up until now as I’ve been busy preparing our system for our upcoming launch on Monday the 8th of March 2010.

Take a look at http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=707 for the full interview, and thanks very much to Andre for having me, he has a very good blog over there that is worth checking out for anyone with an interest in Virtualisation and next generation computing topics!

We are proud to announce that Cloud Central’s Cloud Servers will launch to the wider public on the 8th of March 2010!

What Are We Doing?

Once we ‘go live’ on the 8th of March 2010, we will be removing the beta label from the product, and charging for services according to the pricing schedule located at http://www.cloudcentral.com.au/cloud/servers/pricing.

We’ve are introducing the following system enhancements by go live:

1. Performance Improvements: The performance of the Cloud Servers system has been improved, especially for smaller sized Cloud Servers.
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard: Our Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition database template will be made available.
3. CentOS 5.4 Xen PV & System Updates: Our CentOS templates have added Xen Paravirtualisation support added for higher performance, we have also updated system packages to newer versions for improved security & stability.
4. Debian 5.0.4 Xen PV & System Updates: Our Debian templates have added Xen Paravirtualisation support added for higher performance, we have also updated system packages to newer versions for improved security & stability.
5. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Xen PV & System Updates: Our Ubuntu templates have added Xen Paravirtualisation support added for higher performance, we have also updated system packages to newer versions for improved security & stability.
6. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS LAMP, Web and Database Templates: Ubuntu LAMP, Web and Database templates will be available
7. Control Center UI: Several user interface enhancements have been made to make the system more consistent and easy to use
8. Security: Several security enhancements have been introduced, unfortunately we can’t tell you what they are or we’d have to kill you
9. System Capacity: We have added additional capacity to our system to cater for your on demand computing requirements.
10. Customer Services: We have added additional support resources to provide expert Australian based technical support & customer services.
11. Cloud Server Sizes: Large (8 GB RAM, 512 GB Storage, 4 CCU) – $0.96 / hour, and Huge (15.5GB RAM, 1024 GB Storage, 8 CCU) – $1.92 / hour Cloud Servers will be available for use. We recommend these for large scale databases.

What Should Existing Beta Customers Do?

Existing beta customers who wish to continue services after ‘go live’ should update their billing details at https://secure.cloudcentral.com.au/account/billing/details. If you have not not provided billing details by ‘go live’, your Cloud Servers will be stopped (but you can recover them by supplying valid billing details), if you have not provided valid billing details by the 15th of March 2010 your servers will be deleted.

Thanks

We thank the input of our beta testers who have helped make the service what it is today, we trust that you will continue the journey with us towards simpler, agile, reliable, secure, flexible, open, value for money computing services.

Best Regards,

The Cloud Central Team
1300 144 007 – +61 2 6173 7340
team@cloudcentral.com.au

We are proud to announce that the Cloud Central Cloud Servers public beta will commence on Monday the 15th of February 2010.  We believe that our service has now attained the required level of security and stability to progress to a wider public beta.

We sincerely thank our private beta testers who have evaluated and provided feedback about our services so far.  This feedback has been taken on board, and fed back into the development of the service.  We look forward to your ongoing support as we enter the public beta phase of operation.

Private beta testers can continue to enjoy a free evaluation & testing period over the next two weeks.  We will provide further notice about the arrangements for the public beta over the coming week.

If you have any questions, please feel contact our beta team by emailing beta@cloudcentral.com.au, or calling 1300 144 007.

Best Regards,

Cloud Central Beta Team