Smart infrastructure is all around us–think Google Nest, Ring, etc. What these have in common is an intelligent cloud-based control plane, managing IoT endpoints to deliver benefits like remote management, automatic updates and simple automation for everyday life. Nebulon applies smart infrastructure technology to application infrastructure, effectively bringing public cloud benefits on-premises.

The benefits of Nebulon smartInfrastructure come in four areas. First, application owners (non-IT experts) can quickly provision on-premises application infrastructure for rapid time-to-value. Second, operational overhead is reduced by up to 75% with cloud-like operations that delivers remote management, scaling to 1000s of nodes, automated software updates, and global infrastructure insights. Third, smartInfrastructure supports any application (containerised, virtualised, or bare metal) with its server-based data plane that doesn’t use server resources. And finally, these benefits come with up to 50% lower cost and better data centre density than existing approaches.

smartInfrastructure is server-embedded, infrastructure software delivered as-a-service, and is available directly from several major server vendors as a part of their volume server offering.

• Who needs the product?

Many companies have a cloud-first strategy, but have workloads that remain on-premises for cost, service level or compliance reasons. A recent IDC study indicated 4 out of 5 companies have recently re-patriated workloads from the cloud back on-premises. For organisations who desire the benefits of public cloud for applications that MUST stay on-premises, smartInfrastructure is an ideal alternative.

• What features are relevant?

smartInfrastructure has two parts. The first is infrastructure software delivered as-a-service from the cloud, called Nebulon ON. The software delivers application infrastructure provisioning and management and includes at its foundation, enterprise-class shared and local data services, called NebOS. The second part is a Services Processing Unit (SPU), which is a server-embedded PCIe card that controls the server’s internal SSD’s. The SPUs running NebOS are clustered together for scalability and resilience, and supply the OS and data storage for the servers in a separate fault domain.

• Who is the competition?

Nebulon smartInfrastructure replaces 3-tier and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). In 3-tier architectures, provisioning is slow because external storage is not native to the application server, is complex to manage and automate, and involves multiple teams. HCI uses software-defined storage which, unlike smartInfrastructure, consumes 25% of the server’s resources, forcing customers to purchase 33% more servers than they would with Nebulon. Requiring a hypervisor, HCI has no support for bare metal applications and native container solutions.

• What are some real case examples?

One leading auto manufacturer is deploying an on-premises hyperscale cloud. Choosing Nebulon gave them significant cost savings and at-scale automation, which were not possible with traditional infrastructure approaches.

DCI, a UK-based service provider, builds 5G-enabled edge data centres in shipping crates using liquid immersion cooling. They chose Nebulon to remotely manage multiple sites, reconfigure workloads, and maintain service levels without needing onsite resources to drain coolant for maintenance.

Another UK-based service provider, focused on a carbon-neutral approach to IT services, adopted Nebulon smartInfrastructure for their data that they are repatriating back on-premises to lower costs. With Nebulon they can retain the public cloud experience for their on-premises application infrastructure.