Open Clouds for Research Environments OCRE
VSHN has been contracted to supply the European Research and Academic communities with Exoscale.com cloud computing services. This includes Exoscale infrastructure services (IaaS: compute, storage, networking), VSHN container platform services (CaaS/PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Exoscale.com
Exoscale – the European cloud provider: originally from Switzerland and now part of the A1 Telekom Austria Group.
Services available
- Compute, network, storage (SSD & S3), GPU, VPC
- Kubernetes as a Service
- Database as a Service
- MySQL/MariaDB/Galera, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, Memcached, Kafka etc
- Software as a Service
- GitLab
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Middleware
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
- NGINX Plus & WAF
- Keycloak AAI, etc
- oneclick VDI & Desktop-as-a-Service
- DevOps Support, Professional Services, Application Management
Security & compliance
- Swiss & European companies VSHN & Exoscale, no US Cloud act applicable
- Solves “Schrems II” / CJEU ruling problems
- VSHN: Swiss, privately held
- Exoscale: Swiss, part of A1 Telekom Austria Group, A1 Digital
- ISO 27001, ISO 27018 certified
- ISAE 3402 audit report available
- GDPR-compliant “data processing agreement (DPA)” available at no cost
- Already used by Government, Banking, Health/Medical and Education/Research (see References below)
- 24×7 support available
Pricing & Ordering
- No minimum ordering quantity, turnover, or contract length – most services billed by the hour
- No Ph.D. required to understand the pricing model
- 10% discount (less NREN cost recovery if applicable) on computing services
- Free traffic from & to GEANT
- Additional Discount Commitment (ADC) for 12-month-pre-committed turnover: 3k-10k: 5%, 10-25k: 10%, 25-100k: 15%, >100k: 20%
- Invoicing in EUR or CHF, monthly post-paid, 10 days net
- Underwriter organization: signs contract, gets “admin account”
- creates projects for sub-organizations that will be separated on the invoice, assigns users, can set soft (“alerts”) and hard (“budget”) financial limits on projects
- users have full self-service using web-portal and API (Ansible, Terraform, “exo” CLI)
- Integration with eduGAIN for user management federation underway
References
- CERN
- Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSci Cloud) / RHEA Project: https://www.exoscale.com/syslog/cern-on-exoscale/
- SWITCH
- OpenShift- and Kubernetes- based Container-as-a-Service platform since 2018
- Swiss Federal Archives
- Linked Data Platform https://lindas.admin.ch/
- Other VSHN industry references
Webinar
Interested to use Exoscale or VSHN services in a research institution? Contact us below for more information and a trial voucher: