HyperGrid Brings The Public Cloud Experience To The Corporate Data Center

Hyper-converged infrastructure vendor HyperGrid introduced revamped software Tuesday that delivers billing and services emulating the public cloud experience on private hardware.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup's latest release of its HyperCloud orchestration and management platform offers services across the stack that look and feel like public cloud and extend into the true public cloud, HyperGrid CMO Jim Ensell told CRN.

The aim was to deliver a "fully featured public cloud delivered as a full-stack appliance in enterprise data centers," Ensell told CRN. The appliances can be provisioned on six-month, one-year or three-year contracts.

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The latest offering implements true consumption billing for the first time in a corporate data center, he told CRN.

Like with any public provider, customers can select numbers and sizes of VMs, then pay-as-they-go for usage. The service even allows enterprises to select between reserved or on-demand instances, an option popular in the public cloud for achieving predictable billing.

HyperGrid's roots go back longer than its official founding last year. The company formed through the merger of Gridstore, a hyper-converged appliance vendor, and DCHQ, developer of cloud orchestration and management software. The acquisition of XOcur followed this past April, delivering a business intelligence engine that helps enterprises size required resources.

In its first year of operation after the merger and rebranding, HyperGrid doubled revenue and has kept up that pace of growth since, Ensell told CRN.

The latest product release realizes the vision that drove the merger, he said.

In addition to consumption pricing, the release integrates technology acquired from XOcur that helps business leaders make decisions when provisioning cloud resources.

HyperCloud also added several new cloud services across compute, storage and networking. Those are complemented with a new app store through which enterprises can select from more than 400 templates for deploying applications either on virtual machines or in containers.

The hyper-converged appliances leverage best-of-breed hardware from vendors like HPE and Cisco, and run either VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V, or bare-metal for Docker deployments, said Manoj Nair, the company's chief product officer.

HyperCloud enables self-service provisioning of VMs running on the local appliance, or from public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or OpenStack clouds. The pricing for on-premises virtual servers is benchmarked against the public cloud, Nair said.

Kyle Betts, director of cloud integration at Technologent, told CRN that reselling HyperGrid's technology has helped the systems integrator based in Irvine, Calif. realize its hybrid cloud strategy.

The software culls applications and systems management, he said, allowing his customers to aggregate clouds like AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and VMware.

"I can have a unified way to deploy applications across all those clouds," Betts told CRN.

The market is warming to a pay-as-you-go model for on-premises solutions, he said.

"From a business perspective, our customers enjoy having the clarity of cost," Betts said.

While in many cases private clouds are cheaper, partners struggle to identify what their on-premises components truly cost enterprises. With public cloud, billing is clearer, and actions can be taken to mitigate runaway costs.

"That mentality is starting to become pervasive in the data center and private cloud space," Betts said.