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).

Countries VSHN was awarded contract for Exoscale.com

Exoscale.com

Exoscale – the European cloud provider: originally from Switzerland and now part of the A1 Telekom Austria Group.

Services available

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
  • 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

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: