GreenQloud's service powered solely by Icelandic geothermal- and hydropower
Reykjavík, Iceland: GreenQloud, the industry's first carbon-neutral cloud hosting and storage service provider, has announced a technology partnership with Scality, the pioneer of object-based cloud storage. The move will allow the Icelandic cloud service provider to launch its range of ground-breaking services later this year to users around the world.
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 Eiríkur 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.
Jérôme 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.
GreenQloud is the world's first truly green public compute cloud. GreenQloud offers a fully automated self service cloud server hosting environment and a variety of online storage services aimed at regular consumers, smb's, enterprises and high performance computing users alike. GreenQloud is Truly Green because it exclusively uses geothermal and hydro energy and only operates in ultra high efficient data centers.
Companies or individuals can rent GreenQloud's services by the hour and completely remove their IT's carbon footprint. Customers only pay for what they use so they can grow their online presence without any initial investment in IT infrastructure.
GreenQloud can do this because it is based in Iceland where there is an abundance of truly green energy and free cooling. Iceland is also the only place in the world with redundant high speed fiber connections to Europe and N-America from one location thus reducing the need to have servers and data at many locations when targeting those markets. The cloud is compatible with Amazon's AWS API's making it easy to switch or to scale out to GreenQloud and is compatible with multiple 3rd party services that were built for AWS.
For more on GreenQloud: http://bit.ly/bUmPgh and www.GreenQloud.com
Scality is the developer of RING, a software platform enabling cloud storage to easily scale up to exabytes using commodity server hardware with direct attached storage.
Scality delivers the performance and reliability of a SAN- or NAS-based architecture without the hassles of volume management at one third to half of the cost.
Scality is used by Service Providers to deploy Storage-as-a-Service offerings, by Email Providers to store emails for millions of users, and by web services managing billions of files with very high performance expectations, either for Web 2.0 or business applications. Scality RING is based on a patented object storage technology, which delivers high availability, ease of operations and total control of your data.
For more on Scality: http://bit.ly/ck3G9r and www.scality.com or follow Scality on Twitter: @Scality.
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