What opportunities does infrastructure as a Service present to MSPs? Find out more from Arrow now... #ArrowCloud

1. arrow.com | 0800 983 2525
Cloud
Enterprise Computing Solutions – United Kingdom
ArrowSphere
Infrastructure as a Service for
Managed Service Providers
What opportunities does Infrastructure
as a Service present to MSP’s?
Responsiveness: MSP partners with a public cloud provider have
a huge pool of resources they can dip into almost instantly. This
means when they are acquiring new customers they no longer
need to think about what capacity they have left in their data
centres along with how long it will take to expand that capacity.
MSP’s can win new business and deploy it in the public cloud
instantly, whilst in the background expanding their data centre
capacity and reducing workload to a manageable level.
Contingency cost saving: Most MSP’s Arrow talk to seem to
reserve about 10-20% capacity in their data centres for spikes in
usage, for example: when they onboard new customers, conduct
routine maintenance, or in case of an outage. However, by utilising
the public cloud MSP’s can now run their data centres at 100%
and use the public cloud when they need extra capacity.
When the need is there and they are using the public cloud
regularly month on month, then that would be the time we would
suggest they expand their own data centre to pull these workloads
back in house. This means they are investing in infrastructure that
is already sold so they move to a model where they only buy kit as
and when they need it, which ultimately results in them paying for
only what they use.
Disaster recovery: All MSP’s have a disaster recovery solution
in place, usually it consists of them building in resilience between
their own data centres. But what if their environment goes down?
By utilising public cloud for their DR solution MSP’s can reduce
their risk and ensure a better service to their end user. This also
will reduce the MSP’s infrastructure costs as they will no longer
need resources sitting there idly waiting for a disaster, instead
these resources can be utilised for new customers.
In summary, we believe that across the above scenarios there are
three main benefits to MSP’s for partnering with a public cloud
provider: revenue generation, risk reduction and cost saving. This
is highlighted in the table below.
Revenue Generation Risk Reduction Cost Savings
% of Infrastructure
Cost Savings
Global Footprint Yes Yes Yes
Responsiveness Yes
Contingency Cost Savings Yes 10%
Rent the Peak Cost Options Yes 30%
Test and Dev Cost Savings Yes 40%
DR to the Cloud Yes Yes 20 - 40%
What are the benefits of Infrastructure as a Service?

2. Infrastructure as a Service for Managed Service Providers
In Person
0800 983 2525
Via Email
support@cloud-arrow.com
Online
arrowecs.co.uk/arrowsphere
arrow.com
1884_UK_IAS_11/15_CDS1.2
Softlayer VMware vCloud Air
What- the offer /
solution
Softlayer is an IaaS platform that provides compute, storage & networking resources
as a service.
VMware’s vCloud Air is an IaaS platform that provides
compute, storage & networking resources that can be
managed using existing VMware products.
Why – benefits
of solution
Softlayer gives you the ability to spin up infrastructure on demand & with support for a
broad range of operating systems & virtualisation platforms. Softlayer’s wide range of
bare metal & appliance based solutions enables you to build hybrid, distributed, high
performance architectures and manage it all from a single pane of glass.
VMware vCloud Air gives you the ability to move workloads
between your own cloud and vmWare’s giving you flexibility
& control over where to best place your environment. vCloud
Air allows you to extend your on-premise environment into
the cloud and gain significant TCO savings whilst increasing
agility throughout your investment.
How – do you procure,
provision & manage?
Management of Softlayer’s IaaS is done through a web based portal & via public
facing APIs.
vCloud Air can be managed via vCloud Director which comes
included with the service, or if you have an existing VMware
environment you can manage it using your existing vCenter or
vCloud Director.
When – time to
spin up / turn off
Virtual Cloud Instances – <15 minutes
Private Virtual Server – <15 minutes
Bare Metal Server – 1-4 hours
Bare Metal Instance – 2 hours
You can build new services within minutes using the VMware
vCloud Director or your existing vCenter.
End user sweet spot IBM Softlayer offers bare metal servers (by the hour!) and a range of appliance based
solutions, which enable customers to support use cases powered by their existing
choice virtualisation or storage technology. It is this flexibility and support for complex
net­work topologies that makes IBM Softlayer an ideal platform for running services
that differentiate and can be optimised during their lifetimes.
For simpler less complex requirements, the IBM Softlayer price point and agile scale-
up/scale-down capability makes it a good choice for start-ups, small businesses and
pilot services alike where controlling costs is important.
VMware’s vCloud Air is a hybrid service and best utilised by
people with existing VMware estates looking to exploit the
use of a cloud service with the ability to move workloads
between the cloud and on-premise hardware. This means
people can trial different workloads in the cloud and adopt
the hybrid cloud model. This should work well with customers
who are not as comfortable with Infrastructure as a Service
as they can get the best of on-premise & cloud when choos-
ing how to deploy new services. End users also looking to
have instant burst capabilities when dealing with increasing /
decreasing workloads can gain significant advantages using
VMware’s vCloud Air.
DC locations Americas:
Dallas, San Jose, Washington D.C., Houston, Seattle, Montreal, Toronto, Querétaro
(Mexico), Sao Paulo (Brazil)
Europe/Asia:
Chennai (India), Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Paris, Singapore,
Tokyo
Australia:
Melbourne, Sydney
United States:
North California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Virginia, New Jersey
Europe/Asia:
United Kingdom, Germany, Japan West
Australia:
Australia South
DC tier Tier 3 +
Accreditations
(e.g. ISO27001)
Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), SOC2, PCI DSS, Federal Information Security
Management, Health Insurance Portability & Accountability.
ISO 27001, SOC1 (SSAE16) / SOC2
Default hypervisor Citrix Xen VMware vSphere
Public / private / hybrid Public & Private. Hybrid
SLA SoftLayer will use commercially reasonable efforts to meet the service level of 100%
& issue credit of the fees for service depending on the severity of downtime.
99.9% - 99.95%
Appliance solutions
(Fortinet, Citrix
Netscaler, Vyatta)
Yes No
Comparison of Softlayer & VMware vCloud Air