Introducing PACI – Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure

On Tuesday, November 9, 2011, the Parallels Service Provider engineering team completed a major milestone and delivered our first release of Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure (PACI) and Parallels Operations Automation (POA) 5.3 required for PACI. PACI provides significant new capabilities for our Parallels Automation partners, allowing them to deliver and resell Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs).  

Every day we hear the excitement in the industry surrounding the Cloud and the Cloud services provided by companies such as Amazon. With the release of PACI, Parallels partners will be able to offer the most competitive and comprehensive Cloud services directly to their customers and take advantage of the dynamic growth the Cloud will experience over the next several years.

PACI, together with Parallels Business Automation (PBA) and the newly released Parallels Operations Automation (POA) 5.3, provides a complete solution to launch Cloud infrastructure services. PACI offers a depth of feature-rich advantages, including:

·         Elastic scalability, plus use-based pricing: PACI offers the flexibility to grow or shrink resources instantly as demands increase or decrease. Use-based pricing enables hosting customers to only pay for what they use, creating an appealing value proposition for price-conscious small and medium businesses seeking to migrate internal IT resources to Cloud-based data centers and applications.

·         Containers Virtualization. PACI is fully integrated with Parallels Server Bare Metal Server 5.0, combining Parallels Virtuozzo Containers together with world-class hypervisor technology. PSBM 5.0 provides superior operational efficiency and reliability, while reducing maintenance time and deployment risk with a single solution to deploy either flavor of virtualization. PSBM 5.0 also includes the latest release of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux (PVCfl  v4.7), which delivers maximum performance, density and cost efficiency. PVC allows Service Providers to:

o    Maximize hardware investments by increasing server ratios - reducing costs & improving profitability

o    Automate near instant provisioning and on-the-fly modification of Cloud Server plans

o    Lower operational costs by reducing the administrative burden of day to day operations

·         A simple user interface—plus access to APIs: PACI’s easy-to-use interface is simple to learn regardless of a user’s level of technical skills. Yet, it’s also robust enough for advanced developers, with easily-accessible APIs for programmatic control over the entire hosting environment. PACI also includes built-in business logic parameters that can be tailored to the specific needs of each service provider.

·         Multi-tenant efficiency: The ability to house multiple customers in separate virtual environments on the same physical server within PACI enables service providers to do more with fewer servers, thus reducing overhead and increasing profitability.

·         Self-service provisioning and administration: Extensive automation in PACI lets customers easily provision their own Cloud services by simply clicking on-screen panels. Administration is also simplified, as customers can grow or shrink Cloud resources, load-balance across multiple virtual machines or containers, and protect their sites and networks with firewalls and other security features. These security features, load balancing and other operations can also be automated across multiple virtual environments.

PACI is truly a significant step forward for Parallels and for our partners. Click here for more information on Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure (PACI).

Comments

[data center recovery]

Really awesome article!