Abiquo on Tuesday announced that its award-winning solution was selected by Claranet to power its recently announced Virtual Data Centre offering. Claranet's Virtual Data Centre is an integrated Infrastructure as a Service offering available to the European market. Combining the provision of network and compute resources, it offers a new way of managing infrastructure to Claranet's customers, addressing the key proposition of cloud deployments: the ability to control costs, scalability and speed of implementation.

Pete Malcolm, Abiquo CEO, noted that "Claranet is a great example of how Managed Service Providers use our technology to build sophisticated, self-managed cloud solutions for their customers."

Key to meeting Claranet's needs is the ability for its customers to have complete control over their virtualized environments, not only in the provisioning of virtual servers, storage and networking, but also in sub-dividing allocated resources between customer-defined groups and allowing customers to fully manage their own users and roles. Claranet's infrastructure and development teams are also able to use Abiquo APIs to extend the functionality of the service to provide a unique offering. Truly hypervisor agnostic, Abiquo not only supports multiple hypervisors simultaneously but also allows rapid conversion of virtual machines between any of them with a single drag-and-drop operation.

"We evaluated several products on the market, but only the Abiquo solution provided the feature set we required to meet our customer's needs," said Ian Finlay, Group CIO, Claranet. "Once selected, the solution was rapidly implemented, and the excellent support we received from the Abiquo team made the process feel like a true partnership."

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