PEER 1 Hosting today announced its move into public cloud services with the launch of its Zunicore division.
Although the company has played its part in the private cloud for some time, with bases in 23 locations and 18 data centres, it now wants Zunicore to build its reputation in the public cloud environment.
Cloud Pro spoke to managing director of the new department, Greg Rusu, who said Zunicore was trying to differentiate itself by the amount of control it gives customers within the public cloud environment.
“We see where other public clouds have potentially been quite arcane to engage with and particularly aimed at software developers,” he said.
Instead Rusu and his team are offering open APIs, partnerships with a number of third party cloud application vendors and multiple operating systems, allowing for a public cloud experience with many more customisation options.
Another “unique” aspect, claimed Rusu, was the cloud resource pool Zunicore runs. Instead of renting an entire virtual machine where you may not need all of the power, you can rent by CPU, memory or storage needs.
“If an application or a particular solution that is cloud based is CPU based and requires lots of CPU cores but not so much memory or storage, you can select that or vice versa,” he said.
“The idea there was to basically provide users with a model that is outside of the small, medium, large configuration that others have today. If you want to have a lot of memory, you don’t necessarily have to pay for five, six or eight cores.”
Once you have created one instance, Zunicore then allows you to use this as a template, meaning you don’t have to start from scratch each time. Also, if the application needs more power or storage, you can choose to either automatically or manually scale it to suit.
Pricing sticks to the cloud philosophy of paying only for what you use and Rusu said customers could see with each instance how much it will cost per hour or per month.
“This means they can select to stay within a performance budget or financial budget,” he said.
“Every cloud resource pool that a user would create is individually billed at the end of the month for ease of project based or effort based or campaigned based type work. It is what Zunicore is aimed at.”
For those UK with regulatory concerns, the Canadian firm has opened a data centre in Portsmouth which you can select when setting up an instance.
“We have a data centre in Freemont CA, we have one in Toronto and we have one that is coming up in Portsmouth,” he added.
“When you select the cloud resource pool, the user is able to select the location where it runs.”
The division is also working on multiple currency recognition, meaning customers will be able to pay in US dollars, Canadian dollars, pounds or euros by January 2012.
The service is available today.
