The new metal instances offerings are available now in both Canada and Latin America, but the French-headquartered company’s products are not yet available in the U.S, although they are ramping up their presence in Canada, and the U.S. as well as APAC are on the drawing board for future expansion.
Estelle Azemard, OVHcloud’s vice president for the Americas
OVHcloud, which just celebrated their 10th anniversary in Canada last year, is a French company which IDC has recently upgraded in the cloud computing market, from a contender two years ago, to a major player. They are the third largest hosting provider in the world based on physical servers.
“OVHcloud has had bare metal servers for years, and it is bare metal servers that have brought us to our present level of success,” said Estelle Azemard, OVHcloud’s vice president for the Americas. “The difference between what we have been offering and our metal instances is that we are now able to combine the best of bare metal environment and best of public cloud. It means that the customer will have the ability to deploy very fast. The bare metal will also include all the automation tools in what we call the infrastructure as-a-code model.
OVHcloud is a direct competitor of the big hyperscalers.
“We compete directly with AWS, with their EC2 Metal,” Azemard said. “Azure has this but only for SAP and Google has it but only for Oracle. We offer a broader selection where the customer is not dependent on a catalogue.”
Azemard stressed that the benefits of these new offerings plug into advantages that OVHcloud has traditionally offered to customers.
“We provide the ability for customers to be in control of their budgets – full cost control,” she said. “All our solutions are fully interoperable. We are also the only hyperscaler on the market who can guarantee we wont transfer data out of Canada. We also hold the promise of being a fully green hyperscaler by reaching net zero on all our scopes by 2030. Green is part of our value proposition.”
The three offerings are the: bm-s1, which is powered by an Intel Xeon-E 2274G (4C/8T), 2x 960 GB SSD with hourly pricing of 0,5 euros;
the bm-m1, which is powered by an Intel Xeon-E 2288G (8C/16T), 2x 960 GB SSD with hourly pricing of 0,85 euros;
and the bm-l1, which is powered by an AMD EPYC 7371 (16C/32T), 2x 960 GB SSD with hourly pricing of 1,45 euros.
“They are all aimed at same type of market,” Azemard started. “They are different flavours of the same solution. They don’t compete against things like on-prem services. All of these are dedicated for customers who are well advanced in their digital journey. When we talk about infrastructure as a code we talk about automation tools that provide efficiency to manage very fast compared to on prem. This is a different way of thinking, which gives the customer flexibility to scale and have control of infrastructure. It’s not just a question of competitive advantage but a question of survival – with control over cost.”
OVHcloud’s metal instance offerings are not yet in the US, although these will come later. They are presently strengthening their Canadian data centres however.
“We were initially strong in the Quebec market, with the corporate market in the Toronto area being newer to us,” Azemard said. “We will be opening a data centre in the Toronto area in September 2023.”
