Internap Steps Closer to “Cloudy Colo” Dashboard

There’s a continued movement toward using a single dashboard to see and control all IT assets, concurrent with the movement to use hybrid infrastructures. Internap, positioned squarely in the center of this thanks to a diverse portfolio of colocation, cloud and managed services, has moved closer to this one dashboard vision.

The company has formally announced its “cloudy colo” capabilities it teased earlier. The universal customer portal is now in limited release for Internap Labs customers and generally available at the end of the second quarter for customers in the company’s Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Dallas data centers. The rollout will gradually be extended across the entire footprint.

The company is bringing cloud-like remote visibility and management benefits to colocation customers and enable hybridization of cloud and colocation footprints through a universal customer portal. The portal will be provided as a standard part of Internap’s offering and will deliver granular visibility and management of the colocation environment,  increasing control while reducing costly visits to the data center or the use of remote hands services.

Making Colo Feel Like Cloud

“Based on growing comfort with the automation offered by cloud services, organizations are seeking easier and faster access to their infrastructure,” said Carl Brooks, analyst, Internet infrastructure services at 451 Research. “As a result, there’s a strong opportunity for service providers to give customers access to elastic, on-demand resources with new kinds of controls, agility, ease-of-use, and infrastructure hybridization.”

Rather than replacing traditional services like colo, cloud often acts as a complement or breeding ground for future colo customers.

“Both cloud and colocation will continue to play critical roles in meeting organizations’ diverse application requirements,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. “Internap’s universal customer portal bridges these typically distinct worlds with ‘cloudy colo’ capabilities, providing remote visibility into the colocation environment – unprecedented in data center offerings – and enabling the on-demand integration of colocation, cloud and other infrastructure with the simplicity of one trusted network, one contract and one support team.”

The portal will initially include the following colocation management features:

• Inventory management with integrated support tracking: Customers can review their entire colocation footprint; check device power status and create alerts; deploy stencils for device-level inventory tracking and management; and open support tickets instantly and receive feedback directly from Internap’s NOC.
• Power utilization monitoring and management: Customers can view circuit-level power utilization trends; remotely reboot or power down any configured device without incurring charges; and easily access and view log files of all initiated power actions.
• Environmental and bandwidth monitoring: Customers can view rack-level temperature and humidity conditions; track IP traffic and conduct trend analyses; and capture and analyze device health and usage stats.
• On-demand provisioning of hybrid services: Customers can integrate management of colocation – typically a “siloed” environment – with on-demand provisioning and scaling of cloud compute, bare metal and cloud storage assets to rapidly align their infrastructure portfolio with changing business and application needs.The company calls it on-demand hybridization. It’s made possible by its PlatformConnect service which provides private network connectivity between multiple Internap services – including colocation, managed hosting and cloud – within the same data center. Customers can hybridize application environments as needed via the universal portal, rather than in days or weeks.