Internap Shatters Silos Between Cloud and Colocation with "Cloudy Colo" Capabilities

ATLANTA, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance hosting services, today announced new "cloudy colo" capabilities that deliver cloud-like remote visibility and management benefits to colocation customers and enable on-demand hybridization of cloud and colocation footprints within the data center, through a universal customer portal.

While cloud adoption is growing, colocation remains a critical IT Infrastructure solution for organizations that desire to retain ownership and control of the compute, storage and network equipment. However, traditional colocation typically lacks the transparency and automation inherent in cloud services, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of the environment. In addition, colocated enterprises increasingly require more flexibility to quickly and easily address a wide range of use cases – such as scale-out Web applications or "bursty" and unpredictable workloads – resulting in the need to access a mix of infrastructure options.

"Based on growing comfort with the automation offered by cloud services, organizations are seeking easier and faster access to their infrastructure," said Carl Brooks, analyst, internet infrastructure services at 451 Research. "As a result, there's a strong opportunity for service providers to give customers access to elastic, on-demand resources with new kinds of controls, agility, ease-of-use, and infrastructure hybridization."

Internap's new "cloudy colo" capabilities address these emerging demands via a universal customer portal. A first among service provider offerings, the portal will be provided as a standard part of Internap's offering and will deliver cloud-like granular visibility and management of the colocation environment – increasing control while reducing costly visits to the data center or the use of remote hands services.

The portal will initially include the following colocation management features:

• Inventory management with integrated support tracking: Customers can review their entire colocated footprint; check device power status and create alerts; deploy stencils for device-level inventory tracking and management; and open support tickets instantly and receive feedback directly from Internap's NOC.
• Power utilization monitoring and management: Customers can view circuit-level power utilization trends; remotely reboot or power down any configured device without incurring charges; and easily access and view log files of all initiated power actions.
• Environmental and bandwidth monitoring: Customers can view rack-level temperature and humidity conditions; track IP traffic and conduct trend analyses; and capture and analyze device health and usage stats.
• On-demand provisioning of hybrid services: Customers can integrate management of colocation – typically a "siloed" environment – with on-demand provisioning and scaling of cloud compute, bare metal and cloud storage assets to rapidly align their infrastructure portfolio with changing business and application needs.  

Internap's on-demand hybridization is made possible by its Platform Connect service, which provides private network connectivity between multiple Internap services – including colocation, managed hosting and cloud – within the same data center. This allows customers to hybridize application environments as needed via the universal customer portal within minutes, versus the industry average of days or even weeks.

"Both cloud and colocation will continue to play critical roles in meeting organizations' diverse application requirements," said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. "Internap's universal customer portal bridges these typically distinct worlds with 'cloudy colo' capabilities, providing remote visibility into the colocation environment – unprecedented in data center offerings – and enabling the on-demand integration of colocation, cloud and other infrastructure with the simplicity of one trusted network, one contract and one support team."

The universal customer portal is currently in limited release for Internap Labs customers. It will be generally available at the end of Q2 for the company's Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Dallas data centers and further expanded across its geographically distributed footprint by the end of 2013.

Supporting resources:

• Demo: Customer Portal Demo: Cloudy Colocation Capabilities
• Data Sheets: Customer Portal: Colocation Management and Platform Connect
• Report: Data Center Services Landscape
• Infographic: "Cloudy Colo" On the Horizon

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About Internap
Internap provides intelligent IT Infrastructure services that combine platform flexibility and hybridization with unmatched performance, enabling customers to focus on their core business, improve service levels and lower the cost of IT operations. The company's cloud, hosting and colocation services are delivered from a geographically distributed platform of high-density, redundant data centers. Its patented, performance-optimized IP connectivity guarantees 100% uptime and lowest latency, resulting in a seamless user experience. For more information, visit http://www.internap.com, our blog at http://www.internap.com/blog or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/internap.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include statements related to the features and functionality of our IT Infrastructure solutions, including our "cloudy colo" capabilities. Because such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors include the actual performance of our products and services; our ability to respond successfully to technological change; the availability of services from Internet network service providers or network service providers providing network access loops and local loops on favorable terms, or at all; failure of third party suppliers to deliver their products and services on favorable terms, or at all; failures in our network operations centers, data centers, network access points or computer systems; our ability to provide or improve Internet infrastructure services to our customers; and our ability to protect our intellectual property, as well as other factors discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Given these risks and uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results. We undertake no obligation to update, amend or clarify any forward-looking statement for any reason.

SOURCE Internap Network Services Corporation