GreenQloud’s partnership with Scality represents a union of two schools of thought, one being that a cloud service offering should include features such as flexibility, scalability and “five nines” (99.999 per cent) up-time – while drastically cutting costs; the other that ecology and sustainability should be a primary concern for all IT companies and providers.
According to Eirkur Hrafnsson, GreenQloud’s CEO, carbon neutrality is going to be the number one requirement of forward-thinking companies looking to go beyond their regulatory commitments to meet ecological targets.
Carbon neutrality will happen, he says, as shareholders wake up to the fact that a green strategy is not only desirable, but can also be cost-effective as energy prices continue to rise and carbon taxes are being implemented.
Hrafnsson said GreenQloud is set to become a leader in the cloud services arena, because its platform scores on three main fronts: carbon-neutrality, performance and deployment flexibility.
“GreenQloud not only embodies the true advantages of cloud services – elastic scalability of storage and virtual servers, pay as you go business model with no CapEx and automation of scale via APIs – but it raises the bar in terms of its ecological advantages and performance,” he said. “This is why GreenQloud was honored with a most promising cloud computing award at the Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco this summer. The company is certain to further hit the headlines as its services enter beta testing in the weeks ahead.”
The GreenQloud CEO went on to say that his firm’s range of cloud services are the first in the industry to be compatible with Amazon’s Web Services’ APIs which gives the users of GreenQloud the option of many 3rd party tools from the get-go. GreenQloud is also strategically located in Iceland, a mid-Atlantic network hub, for the best latency possible from one location to North America and Europe.
All of the storage features for the cloud service provider’s object storage, says Hrafnsson, are made possible thanks to Scality’s RING object-storage technology, a cutting-edge platform giving total control over the storage infrastructure, defending it against all forms of failure.
Jrme Lecat, Scality’s CEO, echoed Hrafnsson’s enthusiasm and said that designing cloud services to maintain system uptime, come what may, is an important feature that a growing number of companies are building into their cloud service level agreements.
“All magnetic storage drives fail – it’s a fact of life. Our technology starts from this premise and allows service providers to develop a fault-tolerant storage platform that works, whatever happens,” he said, adding that it does this, along with unlimited scalability, thanks to inherent features designed and built into the core of the storage platform.
Back at GreenQloud, Hrafnsson echoed Lecat’s comments, saying: “We are delighted to be working with a likeminded innovator like Scality, and the value this partnership brings to our carbon-neutral cloud services. One of our missions is to be a truly green alternative to Amazon’s cloud offering. By leveraging the Scality platform we can offer our customers an enterprise class, secure and infinitely scalable S3 compatible storage service at a competitive price and we will continue to work with Scality to bring new, awesome features in the object storage space in the near future.”
“Thanks to these key advantages, it is clear that our services are a win-win-win offering, offering advantages to the storage industry, our clients, and the eco-world as a whole. Our new cloud services are set to become a must-have for companies looking to better their IT efficiencies, and stay green in the process,” he added.
