UltraServe refreshes IaaS platform

New hardware stack, not just PAYG billing.

UltraServe has revamped its Cloud Machines infrastructure-as-a-service offering, adding storage tiering and a new 'plan' billing model in addition to its standard pay-as-you-go model.

The "next-generation" service takes advantage of tweaks to UltraServe's orchestration system as well as the new UltraPOD hardware stack it started rolling out in May.

Existing customers will still have their existing virtual machines sit on the older hardware stack; only new VMs will be hosted in the UltraPOD environment.

Chief executive Samuel Yeats told iTnews that the "majority of the new features" introduced in the newly revised Cloud Machine offering would be available to customers on either hardware stack.

Those on the newer UltraPOD would see some speed improvements, and also be able to take advantage of tiered storage introduced in the new architecture.

"Customers [on the older hardware] wouldn't have access to the automatic tiering of storage ... where storage is automatically moved to flash disks for high I/O components," Yeats said.

Although UltraServe had no plans to immediately bring older customers onto the new UltraPOD platform, Yeats said customers could migrate their VMs themselves, or choose to provision new machines on the UltraPOD infrastructure, "which is a default option".

The new Cloud Machines introduces a new plan-based billing option. Previously, billing was on a pay-as-you-go basis for capacity, billed in arrears.

"Generally with most customers, you have a base level of resources that needs to run at most times and then you have bursty periods on top of that," Yeats said.

Customers could choose to use a plan for that base capacity - with discounts for volume - and pay-as-you-go for additional, burst capacity.

Data centre expansion

Though UltraServe has previously indicated plans to have a data centre presence in Melbourne from sometime this month, Yeats no longer wanted to put a date on go-live.

He did, however, reveal that the company had taken space in NextDC's M1 facility in Port Melbourne, and had had network equipment "sitting in there for the past four or so months".

"Now the [M1] facility is online, [Melbourne's] a priority for us," he said.

"We're totally committed to Melbourne, and working on getting it up and running, but I can't give a date on when we'll be live."

UltraServe has also been considering a move into the Canberra data centre market.

Though Yeats did not provide specifics, he said the company planned to apply for a place on the Federal Government's data centre-as-a-service (DCaaS) multi-use list, which opened for applications last week.

"We're very pleased to see the DCaaS [list] opening up," he said. "We're working on finalising our response for that."