The CloudCentral team is excited to announce the immediate availability of ‘The New CloudCentral Cloud’. The New CloudCentral cloud is the result of over 12-months systems engineering and research by the CloudCentral team.

Platform Overview

The New CloudCentral Cloud is situated in the new NEXTDC C1 enterprise data centre located in Bruce, ACT, Australia providing you with the peace of mind of an ASIO T4 physical security and Tier-III Australian data centre facilities with guaranteed data sovereignty.

The new platform will also be available from the TransACT data centre located in Dickson ACT enabling customers to deploy highly available replicated solutions across geographically separate data centres. The data centres are connected via high-speed private gigabit network connectivity for low-latency and high bandwidth data transfer between availability zones.

CloudCentral has engineered our new platform on top of Citrix CloudPlatform, the Apache CloudStack based open cloud management platform. Also featured are the the latest high-performance Intel Xeon processors, enterprise-grade Oracle ZFS storage, and high-speed 10-gigabit networking.

Enterprise & Government Services

The New CloudCentral Cloud is arguably the most advanced enterprise-grade open cloud platform in Australia and has been selected to host Australian Government services under the terms of the Australian Government Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) Multi Use List (MUL) for cloud and cloud-like services.

A 99.95% availability service level agreement with guaranteed support response times is offered on our new cloud to provide assurance to enterprise and government customers. Higher availability level solutions can be engineered by lever-aging our multiple availability zones.

Platform Features

• Citrix CloudPlatform (based on Apache CloudStack) Open Cloud Management Platform
• Citrix XenServer 6 Hypervisor
• VMware ESX 5.1 Hypervisor (coming soon)
• Oracle ZFS High-Performance Mirrored Replicated SAS+SSD Hybrid Storage
• 10-Gigabit Low-Latency High-Performance Networking
• Snapshots (scheduled and manual)
• Templates (user, domain and public)
• Projects
• Sub-Accounts (create sub-domains within your domain for reseller, client separation or environment separation)
• Sub-Domains (create sub-domains within your domain for reseller, client separation or environment separation)
• Virtual Private Network (VPN)
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• CloudPlatform / Apache CloudStack Open HTTP REST API
• Amazon EC2 Compatible API
• Layer-2 Secure Network Segregation per Customer Network via Industry Standard 802.1Q VLAN’s
• Layer-3 Secure IP Network Firewall per Customer Network
• Layer-3/4 Load Balancer
• Directly Assigned & NAT’d IP Network Addressing

New & Updated Operating Systems + Software

• Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS
• Ubuntu 12.04 Server LTS
• CentOS 5.8
• CentOS 6.3
• Debian 6.0.6
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 (Standard, Enterprise & Datacenter Editions)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (Standard, Enterprise & Datacenter Editions)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions)
• Microsoft Office 2013 (Standard and Professional Plus Editions)
• Oracle Linux 5 Update 8
• Oracle Linux 6 Update 3
• Oracle Solaris 11 Update 1
• Vyatta Network OS Community & Subscription Edition 6.5

Domains & Sub-Accounts

Additional sub-accounts can be created within your domain if you’d like to support multiple resellers or separate your environments such as development, test and production. These can be created by request to our support team.

Special Offer: 30-Day Free Cloud Services for New Customers

All new customers will receive 30 free days to test and evaluate The New CloudCentral Cloud. Please contact our customer service team for access.

Getting Started

Please contact our support team by emailing support@cloudcentral.com.au for access to The New CloudCentral Cloud and to answer any questions you may have.

A presentation by Richard Elling, CTO of Dey Storage Systems, and Cloud Central advisor at the recent ZFS Day:

Video streaming by Ustream

Check out the rest of ZFS day at http://zfsday.com/zfsday/

Today I delivered a presentation about open cloud standards, what they are, and why they matter.

Please take a look at our slide deck and feel free to send us any questions, comments and other feedback you might have.

We have also announced that we are launching our OpenStack Compute API for our cloud compute service. This makes Cloud Central the first provider in Australia to implement an open cloud standard, and also the first OpenStack API compatible cloud in Australia!

Check out the sides here:

CloudHarmony recently conducted storage performance benchmarking on a number of cloud infrastructure providers including Cloud Central.   Cloud Central’s storage results were rated very good, please take a look for yourself at http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in-cloud.html

Cloud Central’s storage architecture features a highly reliable, performant and secure Sun storage hardware, running the ultra scalable ZFS filesystem.  We leverage multiple gigabit connections and iSCSI in our architecture, with redundant power, network and SAS connections in the architecture.

We also use enterprise grade Intel Solid State Disk (SSD) within our storage architecture.  SSD’s enable us to create a hybrid storage pool, enabling very fast read / write IO.  This makes Cloud Central Cloud Servers especially great for transactional systems (eg databases) that require fast IO commits.