Bridgewater-based NYI Enters Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Market
NYI, the data center company with locations in Bridgewater and New York, has announced an enterprise hybrid cloud offering in the New York metropolitan area.
The company introduced the product at a Sept. 19, 2013 event at its Bridgewater data center, saying it had stepped back and waited for the cloud market to mature a bit before deciding what kind of cloud offering it would provide.
NYI is leveraging its close relationship with Peak, an enterprise-class, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud service provider, to offer financial, healthcare, educational and media users a secure, compliant way of leveraging the cloud.
Many users in these New Jersey-centric industries shy away from public and even some private cloud offerings because businesses — especially those in the healthcare and financial worlds — are heavily regulated, and conventional cloud offerings do not include a compliance component.
Phillip Koblence, chief operating officer of NY1, said that what distinguishes this service from others enterprise users might be offered is that it is “one of the only PCI (security standard)- and HIPAA– [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] compliant cloud offerings.”
NYI said in a statement that the hybrid cloud offering permits business-critical infrastructure to be deployed within a traditional facility, while lower-sensitivity assets are virtualized in an intelligent, interconnected virtual cloud that maps existing IPs and VLANs [virtual local area networks] directly into a high-density-layer, two-network topology. In more elegant words, interchanges are accomplished simply and easily, Koblence said.
Koblence characterized the company’s partnership with Peak as a way for NYI to offer services that “from an infrastructure and software standpoint offer the latest and greatest technology from day one. Not only that, but this service is on a path so it will be continuously upgraded.
“Based on Peak’s partnerships with Brocade, NetApp and VMware, all of the technology refresh cycles are built into the offering. Customers can take advantage of industry best performance of a cloud offering over time. We wanted to make sure that with our cloud offering we stayed ahead of the curve,” Koblence continued.
Elaborating on this point, he said other hybrid cloud offerings require a substantial investment that companies would have to amortize over a number of years. “The problem is that technology refresh cycles don’t really care about amortization rates. By the time you deploy a technology like that, there is always something new coming out that is more efficient and has higher performance,” he noted.
“It’s no secret that data center deployments have been shifting to cloud-based services such as Amazon and Rackspace,” said Koblence. “We wanted to offer our customer an alternative to those kinds of services in conjunction with a traditional environment.”
The hybrid offering lets users transfer data into and out of traditional environments for backups, processing and shifting workloads. “If you had, for example, a localized VMware host and you had an application running that needed to scale, based on this type of hybrid model, with a cross-connect directly into the cloud within the data center, you’d be able to shift workloads seamlessly, share the same IP information, share the same network infrastructure,” Koblence explained.
Since this is the first time NYI has entered this kind of service market, Koblence said the data center company realizes that “there is a level of maturity we will look to achieve through this launch. We are doing a lot of beta testing with our customers and letting them have trials in the cloud.”
