The 2016 Product Roadmap at a Glance
What’s new for 2016? Dedicated Cloud, Public Cloud, web hosting, domain names, dedicated servers, Exchange, and Office 365, our product managers provide you with an overview of the key developments which OVH is planning for the upcoming months.
Focus on Dedicated Cloud with Mehdi Bekai
In 2015, market requirements in terms of infrastructure exploded and the definition of QoS evolved greatly. We no longer speak about occasional flexibility but rather dynamic scalability, nor about high availability but instead 100% availability. All of this is to meet the constant and ever increasing hardware and network requirements resulting from exponential growth in content, in requests and in IOPs on a global and multi-datacentre level. For Dedicated Cloud, we are maintaining our original vision: take the best of virtualisation and cloud to offer you a 100% dedicated infrastructure. Therefore, our challenge is to continuously offer the features you need today, but also to anticipate the future and work on integrating innovative services that will change your vision of hosting.
To continue to offer you the services and features that you require and expect, our teams are working on many projects simultaneously.
Network
At the infrastructure level, the equipment upgrade will be finalised in order to meet your anticipated bandwidth requirements, especially for vRack. We will offer you even more bandwidth, among existing datacentres and those to come, total IPv6 compatibility and the possibility to interconnect OVH services with your Dedicated Cloud VMs more easily.
We also want to simplify deployment and daily management. Though the preconfigured vLAN responds to 95% of today’s needs, we want to go even further by offering you total network virtualisation. After a long test phase, we are going to offer VMware’s NSX solution which makes it possible, in a few minutes, to perform your entire network configuration with access to a library of preconfigured VMs to deploy load balancing, firewalls, or even VPN.
Services
The “As a Service” concept has become a must have and as such is a reoccurring theme on Dedicated Cloud. Internally, the Lean approach allows us to focus on the essential, simplifying in 1 click dozens of often complicated operations. Veeam Backup is a concrete example as only one click in vShpere is enough to backup your data.
We are going to extend the integration of new Veeam features, notably calendar management of your backups, customised reports and access to the Enterprise license, unlocking all of the features available in the solution’s control panel.
The step following your backup strategy is the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). What is your recovery plan if your main infrastructure has an incident? To meet this need, the solution Zerto will be offered to easily configure your disaster recovery plan remotely.
Does your business host banking data?
As the foundation of Dedicated Cloud is PCI DSS certified, we offer a simplified compliance option of your virtual infrastructure. With direct access to your administrative and technical documents, we can assist you step by step so that your Dedicated Cloud meets the requirements of the PCI DSS standard.
To follow the health of your infrastructure and anticipate resource needs, we have developed vScope. This tool, first used internally, sends basic indicators which are vital for managing your Dedicated Cloud. To go even further, and particularly to respond to the need to automatically scale or perform advanced diagnostics, we propose the vROPS solution by VMWare which has already been deployed on some test infrastructures and delivers a comprehensive view of the infrastructure.
The 2016 Range
Following user feedback, we have decided to simplify our Dedicated Cloud offer. We will concentrate on a unique range composed of Intel processor, keeping the choice in power of hosts while adding new datastore capacities. For those needing even more power, we are currently testing vSAN technology and its stability under real conditions. If all the indicators are positive, we will see if this service can be integrated into Dedicated Cloud.
Public Cloud and VPS by Jean-Guillaume Burlet
The year 2016 looks to be very exciting for the OVH Public Cloud teams. We are going to start by offering you some of the services that you expect: Openstack private networks through vRackbootables instances from a disk volume and even migration and inter-datacentre load balancingAs the IaaS range already gives you the choice of instances with optimised CPU or RAM, we will now offer a third, optimised disk option. Disks with boosted performance will respond to any of your projects requiring the most demanding uses in terms I/O.
PaaS will arrive as we will gradually introduce the following offers, all as a service: Database, Queue, Logs and Deploy.
VPS has not been excluded, since it already takes advantage of the Public Cloud infrastructure, it will therefore be compatible with our IP failover and vRack services. An option for additional disks will soon emerge to respond to the growing demand to modify storage size. Of course, we will continue to study the possibility of new distributions. Migration from VPS to Public cloud will also become a reality. Lastly, so that you are always best informed about all of the possibilities that we offer, you can expect more communication, documentation and transparency on our quality of service.
The world of web and domain names with Sébastien Almiron
Concerning domain names, we are going to keep offering you more extensions and cover more countries; you will see a new, simpler and faster (3 clicks to order) ordering process and control panel appear along with a manager optimised for large portfolios and performing bulk actions.You can finally reserve your domain names for several years and have the possibility to put in place a registry lock for even more security for your important domains! You will also have the be able to create your own packs and manage your own DNS zones in a more ergonomic manner.
Concerning web hosting, you have already seen that we have announced a partnership with Let’s Encrypt, which will allow us to offer free SSL certificates. Among the other new additions, you will be able to choose the datacentre in which your hosting will be installed (among current and future); we will offer PaaS and DBaaS.
Reseller partners will also benefit from new management of their email accounts as well as from modular hosting, and much more.
Focus on Dedicated Servers, with Maël Dréano
Increased performance has been a key element of our dedicated servers for a number of years and will become our top priority. In 2016, OVH dedicated servers will see the arrival of new CPU architectures, new GPU cards, and even faster storage devices
Bringing you new storage solutions is our second goal for 2016, with new offers permitting to increase flexibility and scalability of storage, for centralised or distributed infrastructures.
Being able to measure more efficiently the performance of our infrastructures through new testing/benchmarking solutions will also become a main focus of our work. We will then be able to finely adapt our configurations for issues that you may encounter and to meet the needs of your real use cases.
To allow you to quickly integrate new resources to your projects, we are also working on a complete revamp of the ordering process: on the web site, directly from the API or from your customer control panel.
Finally, regarding the delivery of servers, there are also new opportunities emerging. In addition to choosing the datacenter, it is going to be possible to choose the rack and date of which your server will be delivered. This is one more step in “rack awareness”.
Focus on Exchange and Office 365 by Rémi Bacha
Exchange 2016 will be available on partners.ovh.com during the first quarter. As an OVH partner, you will be able to access the latest version of Exchange with advantageous pricing conditions.
Within the logic of continuous improvement of our migration to Exchange accounts, we are always listening to your expectations. Following several requests from our customers, we are going to make available to you the API version of the OVH Mail Migrator in the first quarter of 2016. This will permit you to develop your own migration applications or even to execute bulk migrations.
To meet the growing need for unified communications, Sharepoint/One Drive and Skype for Business will be added to our Web range.
The Discovery Foundation version of SharePoint will be included with each Hosted Exchange service. On its side, the Standard SharePoint offer with OneDrive will be proposed in addition to Hosted Exchange. It will include advanced search features, the possibility to create workflows to manage processes, and a 100GB OneDrive account. Regarding the Skype for Business offer, as a first step, it will also be available in addition to the Hosted Exchange offers.
Lastly, to offer you a complete service, we are currently working on the creation of packs based on our Office365 offer.
Developments concerning Partners by Marine Watterlot
The year 2015 marked the launch of the new Partners.ovh.com website.
More than 3,600 partners are taking advantage of the visibility provided by our new directory, designed to better inform end customers looking for a local expert to assist them with their IT projects.
2016 will see the arrival of a commercial Infra Pack. Benefits will include, dedicated support and marketing tools as they are already offered in Web and Telecom Commercial Packs. We will also give you the opportunity to have your teams certified in our three families of products (Telecom, Web and Infrastructure) and to use the official “Certified Partner” logo.
The Web and Telecom Commercial Packs will not be left out. New offers will enrich these packs, starting with the Exchange 2016 reseller offer for Web.
This is not an exhaustive list! We have many other projects planned and as you know, it is innovation that motivates us, but it is your needs which are at the heart of our development. As you are our most important contributor, our roadmap is susceptible to modification thanks to your feedback.
