Supermicro and InMotion Hosting recently released a new case study describing how InMotion Hosting built an on-demand private cloud solution on Supermicro hardware. The high density and resulting cost efficiencies offered by Supermicro MicroBlade servers enabled the successful implementation of OpenStack as a Service concept for InMotion Hosting’s Flex Metal Cloud product.
Open-source technologies
Traditionally OpenStack has been used to power enterprise infrastructure and requires a significant investment of time and resources to develop and deploy. So, it was difficult for smaller teams and organizations to take advantage of the benefits of an OpenStack environment. InMotion Hosting, whose core philosophy revolves around open source technologies, took up this challenge and built an on-demand private cloud powered by OpenStack, Ceph and innovative hardware including Supermicro MicroBlade servers.
Srini Bala, senior director, Solution Technology of Supermicro,
“Supermicro believes in the power of OpenStack and along with InMotion Hosting, wanted to make it easily accessible to smaller and mid-size IT teams. This is made possible through our MicroBlade technology that offers high density and cost efficiencies for a full-featured cloud computing experience to enable OpenStack as a Service. InMotion Hosting’s mission to accelerate private cloud deployment under 45 minutes is commendable and Supermicro is proud to support this.”
Deployment in 45 minutes
With Supermicro’s MicroBlade technology, the Flex Metal Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform can deploy OpenStack on a smaller physical footprint than has ever been done before. Through resource tuning and service optimization, Flex Metal Cloud can fit an entire fully-featured OpenStack deployment on three Supermicro MicroBlade sled server nodes.
Flex Metal Cloud starts off with these three servers as a hyper-converged cloud core and can scale easily to hundreds of servers, thousands of VMs and petabytes of storage. The cloud core can deploy in about 45 minutes and starts at under $600/mo. Additional compute and storage can also be added in minutes.
The hyper-converged OpenStack deployments on Supermicro’s MicroBlade technology allows InMotion Hosting to provide all of the features and functionality of OpenStack while lowering the total cost of ownership of server hardware. This allows for a more affordable cloud for the end consumer. The MicroBlade MBI-6219B-T41N and MicroBlade MBI-6219M-2N present a more efficient way to operate and utilize compute resources. The versatility of these servers also gives an edge over traditional server hardware architectures when it comes to optimizing power, cooling, data center space, and hardware utilization.