The interview below is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc.
This interview was recorded at VMWorld Europe 2008 in Cannes, France, and features a demo by Niko Nelissen, VP Business Development with Q-layer, explaining the concept behind their Virtual Private DataCenter solution targeted at service and hosting providers.
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Update – transcript of the interview:
Q: What does Q-layer do?
We have a solution for service providers. A service provider can be a hosting provider, a commercial datacenter, a Telco, or it can also be an IT department of an enterprise where they service business units in several countries.
We have a Virtual Private Data Center concept, so customers of the service provider can build their own virtual datacenter using an easy-to-use web interface.
Within this VPDC, customers simply select the servers needed, e.g. a Windows server, a Linux server or a Windows Microsoft Exchange server, add them to the environment and connect them to a virtual switch to provide network connectivity. They can also assign storage, virtual SAN’s, virtual file servers, virtual routers, etc. basically building a whole datacenter environment. After clicking on the ‘deploy’- button, the environment will be live in under 10 minutes.
This is the alternative to racking physical servers, which would normally take weeks.
With our system, you have instant availability of a virtual infrastructure.
Q: Who is using this?
We close partnerships with hosting providers all over Europe. They use this to have a new offering into the market; they can provide a whole virtual infrastructure to their customers. They sell virtual capacity in the form of credits. We have a credit concept of storage -, network – and processing credits. This is what is sold to the customers, who uses these credits to build their own environment, whenever and however.
Q: The purchase of credits, is it standard or customized?
It is customized, depending on the business model of the hosting provider. Hosting providers can choose for themselves how many credits you need for a certain virtual machine, a virtual SAN, a Gigabyte of storage, etc.
Q: Will processor intensive applications affect other customers on the same hardware?
It all depends on the underlying technology that is used. Q-layer can be used on top of an existing VMware ESX environment. We also support other hypervisors such as Xen and VirtualBox.
Q: How much does it cost?
It’s capacity based. We also have partnerships were we go into the market together, it really depends on the size of your environment.
Q: How is it been here at VMWorld?
Great, we’ve been seeing people from all over Europe. We’ve also been able to talk with our partners, e.g. partners who create virtual appliances, firewalls and monitoring applications and we integrate these applications into our solution.
Interviewer: Tarry Singh
Video blogger: Charbax