Logicalis To Open "Hybrid" Cloud Based On UCS

Logicalis, a solution provider with operations around the world and in the U.S., plans to open its new cloud computing operations in the U.K. in the next three or four weeks, said Chris Gabriel, director of marketing for the company’s U.K. operations.

Cisco’s UCS combines networking, blade servers, storage, core switching, routing, security, and voice over IP (VoIP) into a single architecture.

Logicalis’ U.S. operations plan to start beta testing a similar cloud offering in the near future, Gabriel said. He called the offering a hybrid cloud, or a “public cloud in a private sort of way.”

It's public in the sense that it's open to multiple customers and completely hosted using the company’s data center and IT infrastructure, and it's private in terms of how it is offered to customers, he said.

Logicalis, one of Cisco's original UCS launch partners, found UCS to be ideal as a platform for hosting public and private clouds, Gabriel said. Automation of many of the processes will be done using new management tools from CA Technologies, he said.

“The stateless nature of UCS combined with CA automation allows us to do heavy lifting into the cloud,” he said. “It packages compute, storage, and security elements with load balancing and VLAN (virtual LANs) and the workload itself. We can migrate big chunky workloads. And because it’s stateless, the workloads don’t even know they’re being moved.”

The Logicalis cloud offering is hosted in a new $12 million data center the company recently built near London, Gabriel said.