Flexiant is Europes first to provide full commercial support for IPv6

Flexiant, an independent cloud platform provider and software and services company, today announced a major upgrade release with the launch of its production ready cloud platform Extility 1.3. Todays release includes the launch of IPv6 support marking Flexiant as the first cloud software provider in Europe to announce full commercial support for IPv6.

Extility 1.3s small foot-print install feature means data centre operators can pilot a cloud offering with relatively little investment in time or capital before developing this deployment into a fully-fledged cloud platform for their customers.

Aimed at combating the threat of virtual machine sprawl the new features in Extility 1.3 allow data centre operators and their end-user customers to manipulate virtual resources and ensure they are always deployed where they are needed.

This is a significant milestone in the development of Extility, a mature cloud platform that is becoming increasingly powerful with every new release and enables business intelligence for enterprise users faster than ever.

Flexiant developed Europes first cloud platform over four years ago and remains one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers worldwide. Flexiants pioneering cloud platform is now being used by the EU across a range of multi-million Euro FP7 projects as a test bed to speed up cloud computings adoption rate by enterprise level companies throughout Europe.

Tony Lucas, Flexiants founder explains:  We completely understand that data centres are restricted by their existing investment in software, hardware and other IT infrastructure.  Our aim is to develop systems which allow customers to benefit from the agility, flexibility and economy of a cloud computing platform while making the best use of their existing capital investment.

Extility 1.3 allows customers to undertake a gradual transition to the cloud rather than re-architecting their entire infrastructure.  This revolutionary cloud platform allows customers the flexibility to pick and choose which services they put on the cloud.

The release includes a range of updates including three enterprise features that will allow licensees to integrate the cloud into existing systems with ease: foreign keys, VLAN interworking, and small footprint installation.

The new foreign keys facility is important for making best use of the speed, economy and flexibility of a cloud platform.  Foreign keys allow the cloud provider and enterprise user not only to define and tag content but also to build its own logic on top. This will allow the user to query resources active within the company.  By tagging resources the enterprise can drill down and see how these are actually being used rather than having them disappear into the black hole of departmental budgets.

Flexiants VLAN interworking feature will allow integration of existing physical servers and the cloud at the network level, allowing customers to move fully or partially to a cloud platform, in a seamless manner. This means end customers can pilot virtualisation by moving to the cloud those services that will bring the greatest benefit, whilst retaining on physical infrastructure those services which are better suited to it.  Services that are most likely to benefit from a move to the cloud include those that may run just once a month and can leave physical servers idle for long periods; when moved to the cloud, such services would share physical resources.

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For more information contact:  Sarah Lee :: 0131 225 3875 :: 07766542110 :: sarah@hottinroof.co.uk

About Flexiant

Flexiant is a software and services company, one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers world wide.  Its public cloud, FlexiScale, was Europes first cloud platform and was launched in 2007. In March 2010 the company launched its flagship product, Extility, a software product that allows licensees to build their own cloud and sell cloud services under their own brand.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing gives customers access to computer resources provided as a utility, often on a pay as you go basis. Dynamically scalable virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Customers can thus avoid owning the physical infrastructure to host their software platform or web site, paying only for those resources that they use.

What are the benefits of cloud computing?

The pay as you go nature of cloud computing means companies can lower costs by eliminating capital investment and reducing operational costs. When resources are not being used, they are not being paid for either.

As computing resources can be dynamically shared between different customers, utilisation rates are improved, and the same computer hardware is used more efficiently. Power consumption is reduced, which has a significant impact on operational costs as well as considerable environmental benefits.

The increased agility of cloud computing means customers can easily scale up and down their computing resource in response to changes in demand. Customers can set up multiple servers with the click of a mouse, rather than wait days or weeks for an engineer to provision them in a data center.

What role does Flexiant play?

Many businesses use hosting providers, data center operators or telecommunications companies to provide and run the servers they use for their web sites and applications. These service providers host the servers of many such businesses, and are now looking to offer cloud computing services to their own customers. Flexiant allows them to do this without significant research and development expenditure by leveraging the six years of software development experience it has accrued as a pioneer in the cloud computing space.