Introducing MyCloudSpace (at the) Edge

mycloudspace Jul 01, 2022

MyCloudSpace is the centre of our universe here at Softsource vBridge. Every day customers log in to this portal to get visibility of, and manage the services they have with us.

Over the last 9 years we have grown this platform from what started as a way for us to drive efficiencies with our own end of month billing process right the way through to a fully featured cloud management platform.

We love it, our customers love it. So much so, here is a pretty graph of tasks performed on the platform across the last few years, great YoY growth and it is fantastic to see our customers and partners interacting with this portal - it is what drives us to innovate and build more functionality.

We deliver everything from virtual machines to remote backup and everything in between, more recently reaching out into public SaaS offerings like M365 backup.

To date, all of these products and services have been driven out of our two hosting locations (Christchurch & Auckland).

Today is the day that changes.

I am pleased to announce we have just gone live with what we are calling MyCloudSpace Edge.

So what is it?

MyCloudSpace Edge allows us to deliver you infrastructure as a service (IaaS).... but at your place!

YES you do get the same opex-based hourly billing you enjoy in our multi tenant cloud platform

YES you get offsite backups back into the same backup fabric that runs the rest of the platform

YES we can customise the size of the edge deployments, its not a one size or nothing approach - if you have 20 virtual machines or 200, we can make it work. We can even scale it later as it grows.

YES you get full remote console access for pesky machines that RDP dies on or need to be configured onto the network

YES we support and fully manage, patch, maintain the hardware and software on site

YES this edge compute sits on a seperate network, we secure this from your site and securely present the networks you need to the hypervisor for your VM's to sit on

More importantly, YES - you manage all of this through the same portal that your existing IaaS and other services with us reside. The same functionality you enjoy for your IaaS virtual machines you can do the same with your remote workloads.

(yes. I am deliberately avoiding  the single pane... term.)

Who is it for?

In most cases, IaaS on our multi-tenant cloud platform in Auckland or Christchurch will be the best fit, however;

We understand that not everything can be in "the cloud" and this is where edge comes in, the two can complement each other.

You could find the below (and 1,000s of other reasons) means "the cloud" might not be the perfect fit

  • Compute next to latency sensitive manufacturing equipment
  • Health and safety compliance
  • Security compliance
  • Large data volumes mean it is ideally processed at the site
  • Tricky connectivity, redundant connection might be impossible
  • And many more...

We are currently rolling it out for a high tech national business who already has IaaS with us. However, we are now providing the compute for their manufacturing sites across both the South and North Islands.

What this looks like in MyCloudSpace

Pretty much the same as what you are used too already! It is seamless, no special sections or portals to log into. You see this along side your other workloads (if you have them).

Virtual Machine List

You can see the location now has a little icon if it is Edge managed, everything else is the same

Deployment

Now when you deploy, you will see your new Edge location(s) in the same workflow, below I have selected the edge site already in Deployment location.

Console access

Yep, we have that too.

Virtual Machine Management

All of the same functions around snapshots, disk extensions etc are all here as well.

Disk add/extend seen below

Snapshot functionality

Power operations

Backup Integration

So there you have it. Something we have talked about doing for a while now and after a few conversations with customers we made it happen.

Ben Young

Ben is the Development Manager at vBridge and the gate keeper of MyCloudSpace.