Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, revamped its hybrid cloud strategy to focus on bringing compatibility, security, compliance, scalability and reliability with its newly upgraded product offerings and its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program. To help businesses, especially small medium enterprises (SME), transform digitally and take advantage of public cloud’s highly elastic, scalable and available characteristics, new appliances are also launched to support enterprises private cloud utilisation needs. 

To support timely and cost-effective hybrid cloud backup, Alibaba Cloud launched a physical server to integrate with Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) solution with embedded backup capabilities to public cloud. The appliance 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 ensures a safe and stable operating environment for users without consuming extra computing resources.

The Hybrid Cloud Storage Array (HCSA) appliance is an enterprise level storage. It blends in with the Alibaba Cloud storage service thereby connecting the local storage with the elastic, scalable and unlimited 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 fully 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.

Current partners include global partners 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.

Kevin Li, Hybrid Cloud Business General Manager, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: “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. 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.”

Zhenzhong Cao, Chief Digital Consultant, Whale Cloud International, said: “Whale Cloud, after partnering with Alibaba Cloud for the last two years, has witnessed great progress in our own operations 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.”

James Wong, Vice President, Global Business of NCS, said: “We are excited about the partnership and business opportunities with Alibaba Cloud in Singapore, China and the Asia Pacific region. Our NEXT Digital Solution and Cloud Service Delivery experts are embracing the latest cloud operating model to support and enable digital transformation and cloud migration journey of our clients. The partnership with Alibaba Cloud can further enhance our ability to harness leading technologies in serving our Government and Enterprise clients.”

Richard Huang, DiGiCOR Co-founder & CEO, said: “We are excited to partner with Alibaba Cloud, APAC’s largest cloud service provider to extend their core IT infrastructure footprint in Australia and NZ with DiGiCOR’s core infrastructure. This partnership will allow us to provide robust cloud infrastructure such as Alibaba Cloud ZStack, to best match our clients’ requirements across a broad range of industry sectors. The deliverables from this partnership is able to bring cost-effective and class leading services to customers across the region.”

Christanto Suryadarma, Senior Director and General Manager - APAC Channels, Mid-market & SMB, Alibaba Cloud Partnership, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said: “Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has successfully collaborated with Alibaba Cloud since 2018 to deliver the next generation of hybrid cloud and drive customer success in sectors such as telecommunications, financial services, aviation and the public sector. We are pleased to take our partnership with Alibaba Cloud to the next level as an Alibaba Hybrid Cloud Partner. Through our Global Channels ecosystem and innovation portfolio, we will accelerate collaboration with Alibaba Cloud Solutions and create new synergies to help customers accelerate their digital transformations, harness the full power of their information, wherever it resides, and benefit from a modern cloud experience on-premises through our unique consumption offering and as-a-service vision.”

Michael Tsang, Senior Director, Partner Account Management, Equinix Asia-Pacific, said: “We have a long history of collaboration with Alibaba Cloud to meet digital leaders’ evolving needs for hybrid multicloud architecture. Through Equinix Fabric™, enterprises can establish direct and scalable connections to Alibaba Cloud in 17 metros across the globe. Combining Alibaba Cloud’s solutions, including ZStack and Storage Array, with our global network and robust ecosystems of 2,900+ cloud and IT service providers, we enable enterprises to fast-track their digital advantage with an agile, secure and cost-efficient IT infrastructure.”

In addition to the hardware appliances, Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its ZStack, a light-weight hybrid cloud solution which can be easily deployed to manage hardware in data centres, 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.