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
  • DE-FRA, DE-MUC, AT-VIE, CH-GVA, CH-ZRH, BG-SOF – with guaranteed data location
  • Backbone with existing peerings with GEANT
  • Dedicated physical hardware is available
• Kubernetes as a Service
  • Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS)
  • APPUiO Red Hat OpenShift
  • APPUiO Cloud: Kubernetes Namespace as a Service
• Database as a Service
  • Exoscale DBaaS: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kafka, Redis, OpenSearch
  • VSHN managed services: MariaDB/Galera, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Memcached, CockroachDB, etc
• Software as a Service
  • GitLab
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Middleware
  • NGINX Plus & WAF
  • Keycloak AAI, etc
  • oneclick VDI & Desktop-as-a-Service
  • Cilium cloud-native SDN
  • Rook/CEPH cloud-native storage
  • VSHN Application Catalog
• Professional Services,
  • VSHN AppOps: Custom 24×7 Application Operations
  • VSHN AppFlow: DevOps Support, Software Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes Configuration Management

Security & compliance

• Swiss & European companies VSHN & Exoscale, no US Cloud act applicable
  • Solves “Schrems II” / CJEU legal compliance problems
  • VSHN: Swiss, privately held
  • Exoscale: Swiss, part of A1 Telekom Austria Group, A1 Digital
• ISO 27001, ISO 27018 certified
  • https://www.exoscale.com/compliance/
  • ISO 27001 certified
• ISAE 3402 audit report available
• GDPR-compliant “data processing agreement (DPA)” is 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 are billed by the hour
  • No Ph.D. is required to understand the pricing model
• 10% discount (less NREN cost recovery if applicable) on computing services including instances, storage S3-compatible object storage, SKS Kubernetes, etc
  • Free traffic from & to GEANT (and all connected NRENs and institutions) for both instances and object storage
  • Discounts on DBaaS: OpenSearch, Kafka: full discount, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis: half discount
  • No discount on Marketplace services or Licenses (e.g. instance Windows license)
• 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
• Integration with OpenID Connect IDP is already supported for SSO

References

• CERN
  • Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSci Cloud) / RHEA Project: https://www.exoscale.com/syslog/cern-on-exoscale/ 
• University of Utrecht ASReview project
• Leibniz-Institut für Gemüse und Zierpflanzenbau (IGZ)
• SWITCH
  • OpenShift- based Container-as-a-Service platform since 2018
• Swiss Federal Archives
  • Linked Data Platform https://lindas.admin.ch/ 
• Other VSHN industry references
  • https://www.vshn.ch/en/partners/success-stories/ 

Webinar in English

Webinar in German

Interested to use Exoscale or VSHN services in a research institution? Contact us below for more information and a trial voucher: