OrionVM’s MicroPoPs Enable Legacy Hosting Providers To Challenge Public Cloud Giants

ISPs and traditional data centers can leverage the Australian startup’s technology to rapidly launch white-label infrastructure services delivering high-performance cloud backup, remote desktops and other services that are in-demand during the coronavirus pandemic.

Wholesale cloud infrastructure provider OrionVM launched a solution Tuesday enabling ISPs and legacy hosting providers to offer cloud services rivaling the hyperscale giants.

The Australian-American startup’s Micro Point of Presence (PoP) offering installs and manages high-performance infrastructure those regional hosting providers can white label and then bring to market either direct or through their own resellers, Daniel Pfeiffer, OrionVM‘s vice president of marketing and partnerships, told CRN.

“Our solution stack can be completely owned by our partners. The data center can own the complete stack and deploy a fully channel-enabled cloud ecosystem,” Pfeiffer said.

[Related: Scale Of Cloud Growth In Q3 ‘A Little Surprising,’ Says Synergy Research]

OrionVM was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2010, but opened its North American headquarters in San Francisco six years ago in a bid to offer an alternative to the reigning public cloud powerhouses with infrastructure inspired by supercomputer architecture.

In recent years, the startup has expanded its solution suite largely around partnership: with Comet Backup to deliver Backup-as-a-Service, Parallels for Desktop-as-a-Service and WatchGuard for security and universal threat management.

“All work out of the box on our platform, and also work in tandem together,” Pfeiffer said.

The new MicroPoPs, as the company calls them, can be resold as standalone products or bundled with those solutions or any others the services provider already use.

By collocating OrionVM hardware and data stores, customers access blazing-fast networking through an InfiniBand stack and dedicated connections to public clouds that decrease latency and can reduce data ingress and egress fees.

The MicroPoPs, which can be deployed on virtualized infrastructure or bare-metal, are typically sold as three-year subscription contracts, with the solution custom-tailored to fit the technical and business models of the customers.

OrionVM manages and supports the equipment and provides enablement, marketing and channel training, Pfeiffer said.

“They have time to build out their ecosystem and we help them with all channel enablement, go-to-market strategy,” he told CRN.

For mid-tier data center providers, the technology creates another revenue stream that can prevent customer erosion to public clouds. OrionVM believes the multi-tenant MicroPoPs deliver 40 to 60 percent savings compared to Amazon Web Services and other hyper-scalers.

Other OrionVM resellers can provision infrastructure in those data centers, delivering more business to the MicroPoP customer—an arrangement OrionVM also benefits from as that infrastructure becomes another availability zone for its global cloud network, expanding access to underserved geographies.

“Orion will be buying more racks from them to expand our footprint. It’s a distributed model that gives us a wider network of PoPs,” Pfeiffer said.

OrionVM is also working to strike deals with large telecoms to bolster the solution with bundled networking, he said.

“We’re addressing a massive gap in the market that public clouds can’t serve because of their business model,” Pfeiffer said.

The solution is particularly useful to legacy hosting providers in the time of the coronavirus pandemic as they look to provide remote desktops, distributed applications, cloud backup and security to customers that have shifted to remote workforces.

The first partner for the launch of MicroPoPs is DATA3, a Tulsa, OK-headquartered data center provider that plans to offer the OrionVM-based cloud to some of the world’s largest enterprises.

“We spent six months looking for a cloud partner we knew would be compatible with the customer service levels and leading-edge performance our customers were accustomed to getting from DATA3,” COO David Harrelson told CRN.

DATA3 evaluated the full stack of OrionVM cloud services for scalability and performance, both on bare-metal and virtualized IaaS, he said.

“When they demonstrated that their total commitment to customer service was aligned with ours, we needed to look no further for our technology partner,” Harrelson said.

With OrionVMs reliability and IOPS performance, DATA3 plans to bring best-of-breed cloud to customers in aerospace, defense, oil & gas, health care and other industries, he told CRN.