enStratus and ReliaCloud

For many organizations, one of the scary parts of cloud computing is the idea of trusting your computing infrastructure to a faceless entity with little or no local presence. VISI, one of the largest managed services providers in the Upper Midwest, has a solution for that problem with the introduction of the beta of their Infrastructure as a Service offering, ReliaCloud. enStratus has been actively working with ReliaCloud on the launch of their new service, and we'd like to tell you about our support for the platform.

ReliaCloud supports the core elements of a compute cloud:

• On-demand, persistent pay-per hour servers with standard high availability
• Static IP assignment
• Private IP space
• Load balancing

In addition, ReliaCloud offers NAT-based networking that you can leverage to create a kind of private network in the cloud.

Through enStratus, ReliaCloud customers can manage all aspects of their ReliaCloud infrastructure and gain access to enhanced features such as:

• User management (including control of shell access to servers) with roles
• Extended meta-data, including custom names and labels
• Audit controls, including access to server stopping/termination reasons
• Logging of server events to the enStratus console
• Integration with intrusion detection systems (IDS)
• Multiple levels of server monitoring
• Alerting on critical cloud events

That's just our initial support for the ReliaCloud platform. 

Early in the new year, we will introduce auto-scaling, recovery, and backup management through our Cluster Manager. Once this effort is complete, ReliaCloud customers will be able to leverage enStratus to:

• Define auto-scaling criteria and have your infrastructure scale up and down automatically based on load metrics (with governors in place)
• Define auto-recovery procedures and have your infrastructure automatically recover to replacement servers in the event of server failure
• Encryption management so you can have full in-transit and at-rest encryption of cloud data while keeping your encryption and access credentials securely outside of ReliaCloud
• Automated backups of your systems, including the ability to have backups regularly copied to a secondary cloud
• The ability to use ReliaCloud as a DR tool for your existing infrastructure
• Analytics and reporting on the performance of your individual servers or your infrastructure as whole

We're really excited about what VISI's been working on and believe we have a lot of value to add for ReliaCloud customers.