The NETWAYS Group offers a very wide range of services and products relating to the development, management, automation and monitoring of IT infrastructure in the open source sector. We operate a hardware store, hold training courses, organize conferences, provide operational support and advise customers on challenges relating to the automation and monitoring of their on-prem systems. With our NETWAYS Web Services we have also established ourselves as a successful cloud provider for German-speaking countries. To kick off our tutorial series on our NETWAYS Cloud, we will first address the basic questions.
What do we actually do as a cloud provider?
As a cloud provider, we offer you flexible cloud services. The basic idea is that we virtualize our computer resources and then make them available to our customers as a service in the form of servers, data storage or applications. These are (usually) accessible via the Internet and can be used on any device. This requires an IT infrastructure on our part, which is made up of hardware (i.e. servers), virtualization, storage and network components. We use the following for our hardware two ISO27001-certified data centers in Nuremberg, which are operated by partners. We use both data centers completely independently with our own infrastructure (firewalls, load balancers, switches, etc.). Our data centers are redundantly connected to each other with 10,000 MBit/s via fiber optics, so that a failover to the other location can take place in the event of problems. All availability zones and locations are therefore in Germany and are subject to the GDPR. We take a maximally transparent approach to data protection and security: you can view our TOMs, AVV, the list of all subcontractors and all GTCs here and see that your data is in good hands with us.
What is our NETWAYS Cloud based on?
We use the OpenStack software project as the architecture for our cloud computing. OpenStack is an open source project that is supported by numerous well-known companies (Suse, Linux, HP, etc.) and is constantly being developed further. It was originally launched by Rackspace and NASA. It is made up of individual software elements (Nova, Keystone, Glance, Neutron, Cinder, Swift, Horizon), which are used to create a cloud platform. It is therefore a cloud operating system with a wide range of functions. As the name OpenStack suggests, the source code is freely accessible and therefore promises transparency and security. You can make changes to the code yourself to adapt it to your own requirements. The huge community also ensures that new innovations are constantly being driven forward. As we only use standardized OpenStack interfaces for our NETWAYS Cloud, there is no risk of vendor lock-in. This means you can easily migrate your company data if necessary, which makes it possible to switch providers at any time.
What are the advantages for you?
Flexibility is an important argument. You save yourself the effort of having to invest in your own hardware. This then has to be maintained, which in turn costs time and ultimately money. After a few years, the hardware has to be upgraded or replaced with new hardware. This entire procedure is eliminated if you operate cloud computing on our NETWAYS Cloud. With just a few clicks, you can start the desired VMs in the right size via our web interface. If you run out of storage space or need more power on your VMs – no problem: you can freely scale your resources up and down at any time. And if you no longer need a VM, you can simply delete it at any time. From this point on, no further costs will be incurred. So there are no contract terms with our NETWAYS Cloud. And since billing is based on the pay-as-you-go principle, there are no monthly flat rates. At the end of the month, you are only charged for the resources that were actually used for your setup. Another important argument in favor of our NETWAYS Cloud is our MyEngineer® support service. You can use our cloud as a pure infrastructure as a service and take care of setting up and maintaining your applications yourself. Alternatively, you can also hand over some or all of these tasks to our MyEngineer® support service. Our colleagues will discuss the upcoming tasks with you in advance and take care of them as a result. This means that you can add the expertise of our colleagues to your IT department at any time. And the same principles apply here as with the NETWAYS Cloud: there is no flat-rate support fee. You get unlimited help 24/7 if you need it – and if you don’t, there are no costs.
Would you like to find out more about our cloud services?
Then contact us now for more information.
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