In order to accelerate adoption to the “cloud” among enterprises, Alibaba Cloud announced that it further strengthened its hybrid cloud strategy by focusing on compatibility, security, compliance, scalability and reliability with the introduction of new product offerings and its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program.
The objective of the revamp is aimed at helping businesses, especially the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in their digital transformation journey and for them to be able to take advantage of the public cloud’s highly elastic, scalable and available characteristics. This is made possible by the launch of new appliances that support enterprises’ cloud usage needs.
Alibaba Cloud launched a physical server to integrate with Hybrid Backup Recovery solution with embedded backup capabilities to the public cloud. It acts as a bridge between customers on-premise servers and the public cloud without compromising network security and efficiency. Its dual power source, network ports and hot backup disc also ensure a safe and stable operating environment for users without consuming extra computing resources.
On the other hand, the Hybrid Cloud Storage Array (HCSA) appliance is an enterprise level storage. It blends in with the Alibaba Cloud storage service and connects the local storage with the public cloud storage to create a smooth hybrid cloud environment with ease of operation. HCSA supports multiple hybrid cloud modes such as cloud caching, replication, tiering and snapshots with its redundant hardware design to ensure there is no single point of failure during operation. With HCSA, customers can easily implement cross team file management and collaboration, unified heterogeneous storage management, and storage extension from local server to public cloud.
To enable joint innovation and service delivery with hybrid cloud partners, Alibaba Cloud launched its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program to provide an ecosystem for capable partners to plan, design, and resell services to propel customers’ hybrid cloud adoption journey. Alibaba Cloud will also offer free technical resources to qualified partners under the program including free ZStack licenses with unlimited CPU cores.
The program includes current global partners such as DXC Technology, Equinix, HPE, NCS, Whale Cloud. European partners Arrow Electronics, Softline Group and APAC partners AsiaPac, B&Data, Blue Power Technology, Cloudify, CTC Global, DiGiCOR, and Sen Spirit.
A key observation from 2020 is that hybrid cloud deployments will accelerate in the time to come as it expedites the digital transformation requirements of businesses everywhere, says Kevin Li, Hybrid Cloud Business General Manager, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “At Alibaba Cloud, we are committed to making it easier for enterprises of any scale to accelerate their digital transformation requirements. We want to create an ecosystem for hybrid cloud partners so that together we can allow businesses to compete in the digital era.”
A company called Whale Cloud, after partnering with Alibaba Cloud over the last two years, said it had witnessed great progress in its operations by adopting digital technology and cloud. “We firmly believe the potential cloud can bring and strive to deliver best digital tools and telco BSS/OSS to our customers by leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s Hybrid solutions. Enterprise digital transformation has just begun and, together with Alibaba Cloud, we’ll help enterprises adopt digital tools and cloud infrastructure, actively participate in the digital economy, and create better products and services,” says Zhenzhong Cao, Chief Digital Consultant, Whale Cloud International. a data intelligence technology company.
Aside from hardware appliances, Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its ZStack, a light-weight hybrid cloud solution that can be easily deployed to manage hardware in data centers, servers on the edge, and hybrid cloud environments across on-premises and Alibaba Cloud resources.
Compared with traditional private and hybrid cloud solutions, Alibaba Cloud ZStack is more cost-efficient and scalable, and can be deployed from as few as a single node in 30 minutes and easily scale out to hundreds of servers when needed.