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Catalyst offer competitive open source cloud in New Zealand
New Zealand open-source champion Catalyst has taken on the multinationals launching a locally-hosted automated cloud service.
The Catalyst Cloud service uses OpenStack, a free, open-source set of tools. It was built using low-cost commodity hardware.
Catalyst Cloud was officially opened
this morning by Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce.
See Catalyst
Cloud Formally Launched for the company's own
description.
Congrats @CatalystNZ for launching their new Porirua Data Centre & #catalystcloud. Another growing Kiwi IT company pic.twitter.com/EdHGnujmNq— Steven Joyce (@stevenljoyce) February 18, 2015
In a media statement Catalyst says the service is: "The product of two years of research and development and millions of dollars of investment".
It has capacity for 100,000 virtual servers. New Zealanders aren't short of cloud computing options. All the big multinational cloud providers serve customers here.
Because they operate around the world they get global economies of scale. And yet a quick glance at Catalyst's price list shows costs are in line with brands such as Amazon Web Services.
Catalyst says this means the company could keep as much as NZ$40 million a year of cloud business in New Zealand.
Local customers get the advantage of paying for cloud services in New Zealand dollars, which, given currency volatility, makes it easier to plan spending.
There are also latency benefits. While ping times to Sydney-based servers are in line with times between cities at the extreme north and south ends of New Zealand, users need to pay extra for dedicated international bandwidth to get the best results.
Add all in the arguments about data sovereignty and Catalyst has a compelling sales story.
At the time of writing Catalyst offers a web
dashboard for real-time provisioning of virtual machines,
network and storage. You can buy compute services, a
machine image service, block and object storage, software
defined networking (SDN), automated monitoring and
security. Catalyst says it has VPN-as-a-service in
beta.
Catalyst Cloud formally launches. They're a signatory to the #nzcloudcode too. Good stuff @normnz and @CatalystNZ http://t.co/Vc14ly91Gn— Paul Matthews (@nzPaulM) February 18, 2015
This post first appeared
at
billbennett.co.nz as UCatalyst
offer competitive open source cloud in New
Zealand
Bill Bennett
Freelance journalist.
Auckland-based Bill Bennett writes technology and business stories that are directly relevant to New Zealand readers.
His emphasis is on telecommunications, but he also covers other aspects of technology and business. You can find his features in the New Zealand Herald and hear him regularly on RNZ Nine to Noon and the NZ Tech Podcast.
Bennett's The Download Weekly newsletter is published every Friday. You can sign up for it here.
If you want to support his work, you can make a donation to his PressPatron account.
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