TMCnet News

Lightcrest Crushes Cloud Costs with Kahu, the Next-Generation Hybrid Cloud Platform
[May 04, 2016]

Lightcrest Crushes Cloud Costs with Kahu, the Next-Generation Hybrid Cloud Platform


Lightcrest, the value-leader in hybrid cloud, today announced the launch of Kahu, a pre-integrated computing fabric that enables businesses of any size to become owners, rather than renters, of their cloud infrastructure. The Kahu Compute Fabric is integrated into a high-performance cloud exchange that allows customers to eliminate recurring rent for their core workloads, while increasing their public cloud options. The result is significantly reduced total cost-of-ownership, higher performance for steady-state applications, and maximal choice when selecting public cloud services across multiple providers.

The increasing costs that organizations face as they mature in traditional cloud environments must be met by both innovative technology and creative financial models. Kahu provides the foundation for low-cost, premium web-scale infrastructure through an integrated hardware and software stack that is more cost-efficient than public cloud and incumbent virtualization products. Because Kahu is completely software defined, companies can manage compute, storage, and networking through a single pane of glass. The new Kahu REST API provides developers with workflow automation and the ability to treat their Kahu Compute Fabric as a piece of code.

"We chose Kahu because it allowed us to consolidate our on-going public cloud workloads onto a system that increased performance and lowered our costs. We also love the intuitive interface and the ease of setup. The team is excited to be benefiting from this product launch and is looking forward to further cost savings as we scale," said Jason Tagg, Group Director Digital Development, Inc.

Customers Savings Millions with the Kahu Cost Cliff

Kahu eliminates the barrier to entry for cloud ownership by providing customers with a turn-key platform that is optimized for hybrid cloud. When customers capitalize Kahu, they approach the "cost cliff" - their core infrastructure asset costs drop out of their bill and they are left with a nominal subscription fee. This model eliminates the barrier to entry for cloud ownership, and provides the best of both worlds: low-cost, high-performance infrastructure coupled with low-latency access to leading public cloud providers.

Customers benefit from:

  • The best cost-to-performance ratios in the industry
  • The lowest long-term enterprise cloud costs in the industry
  • Up to 4x increases in performance over legacy public cloud providers
  • Increased operational efficiencies through Kahu Control Plane
  • Lower staffing costs through Kahu Cloud Subscription
  • High-octane storage performance through SSD-backed scale-out storage
  • ncreased options for public cloud integration through Kahu Cloud Exchange



Lightcrest engineered Kahu to be a single-license product. The compute, networking, and storage is all governed by a single, simple license - which not only takes the complexity out of cost projection, but makes future scalability a much simpler endeavor. The Kahu software is delivered on pre-optimized hardware, called Kahu Bricks, which takes the guesswork out of optimal hardware integration and provides a turn-key computing fabric.

"Our application is very latency sensitive and we required the utmost in performance for our cloud environment. Kahu provided us with a software-defined data center overnight, delivering on the performance and automation we needed to succeed - and saving us around 65% in total cost compared with alternative cloud deployments," said Dustin Hilgaertner, CTO of BeaconLive.


Maximizing Agility with Software-Defined "Everything" Architecture

Enterprise cloud environments must make it easy for customers to scale their infrastructure without huge increases in costs, both from a staffing and infrastructure standpoint. Kahu empowers lean teams by providing a software-defined "everything" architecture - giving developers and operations staff alike the ability to manage scale through the click of a button. As Kahu nodes are added, the control plane automatically discovers them and presents them to the user for consumption. In many cases, traditional infrastructure like SANs, load balancers, and legacy virtualized servers can be replaced with a Kahu Compute Fabric.

This latest release of Kahu features a super-fast HTML 5 user interface that allows customers of any skill-level to manage virtual resources and storage in a fine-grained way. As virtual machines and storage is provisioned through the REST API, they become immediately visible in the web-based user interface. As virtual machines and disks are allocated, storage can be shared across the fabric, empowering customers to enjoy some of the fastest VM boot-times in the industry.

Since Lightcrest is an avid open source contributor and consumer, customers benefit from leading advances in hypervisor technology and network function virtualization - at the fraction of the cost imposed by traditional software vendors and cloud providers in the space.

"Kahu represents the logical next step in the software-defined data center. By leveraging best-of-breed open source with Lightcrest technologies on proven hardware configurations, Kahu delivers an integrated, cohesive solution that delivers on the promises of the cloud, while keeping its feet firmly planted in business fundamentals," said Alexander Guy, Product Development Manager, Lightcrest.

Availability and Licensing

Kahu is provided on a single-license model, where hardware and software is delivered as a discrete, unified unit. Customers can own Kahu even if it is deployed in Lightcrest hybrid-optimized facilities.

Lightcrest is currently offering Kahu now and providing 30-day evaluations on Kahu GP Bricks. Customers are free to request evaluation here at the Lightcrest website.

Resources

About Lightcrest

Lightcrest builds Kahu, the value-leader in hybrid cloud infrastructure. With Kahu you stop paying paying rent for your cloud assets, and your core infrastructure costs drop out of your bill. The Kahu Compute Fabric provides software-defined interfaces to dense compute, storage, and network function virtualization on a unified hardware and software platform. By tapping into Kahu Cloud Exchange, customers realize increased performance and lower costs for steady-state workloads - and increased public cloud catalog through low-latency interconnectivity. Kahu eliminates the barrier to cloud ownership, and empowers businesses of any size to transform their cloud from a cost-center into a profit-generator. Learn more at www.lightcrest.com or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) at @Lightcrest.

© 2016 Lightcrest, LLC All rights reserved. Lightcrest, the Lightcrest logo and Kahu are trademarks of Lightcrest, LLC, registered or pending in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective holder(s).


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]