Amax intros private cloud appliance

Cloud infrastructure developer Amax has introduced a new pre-integrated cloud appliance, dubbed CloudMax Apex, aimed at easing the migration of mid-sized and large enterprises implementing private cloud infrastructures.

The Apex joins the CloudMax Mini appliance that the company introduced in April, which is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. The consolidated appliances are designed to help enterprises move quickly to cloud architectures, integrating hardware, storage, networking, virtualization, security, disaster recovery and management software in one box.

The Apex complements the CloudMax Mini and adds full redundancy on all compute nodes as well as a redundant head node, according to the company. Because the appliance is designed to support an organization with up to 1000 employees, improvements have also been made to the networking infrastructure, with dual-port 10-GigE connections per node, a 10-GigE switch with 40 GigE uplinks and support for Intel’s Direct Cache Access to accommodate for the increase in required bandwidth, the company said. It also features a new unified storage platform, which centralizes and simplifies data management, and a host of new local/remote protection features designed to enhance data integrity and enable disaster recovery.

“The CloudMax family was developed specifically to eliminate the associated complexity and excessive costs with traditional enterprise cloud deployments by offering a pre-engineered, open-architecture designed, complete out-of-the-box cloud solution,” said James Huang, product marketing manager for Amax. “The Apex was designed specifically for enterprise environments with diverse computing infrastructure requirements across virtual and physical machines, and supports various hypervisors and operating systems from a single end-to-end management platform.”

Amax estimates that deployment of the CloudMax Apex can reduce capital expense by 75 percent and operational expense by 25 percent, and boost resource utilization by 50 to 60 percent.

“Businesses typically look to the cloud because it is more cost-effective. The hurdle lies within the need to have a business make the necessary transitions with its personnel and processes within its environment prior to implementing the cloud,” Huang said. “Once personnel and processes are prepared to make the shift in the applications delivery model, the benefits of the cloud can be realized.”

 Related: Microsoft Formally Announces Its "Cloud OS" Strategy