Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, revamped its hybrid cloud strategy to focus on bringing compatibility, security, compliance, scalability and reliability with its newly upgraded product offerings and its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program.
To help businesses, especially small medium enterprises (SME) transform digitally and take advantage of public cloud’s highly elastic, scalable and available characteristics, new appliances are also launched to support enterprises private cloud utilization needs.
To support timely and cost-effective hybrid cloud backup, Alibaba Cloud launched a physical server to integrate with Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) solution with embedded backup capabilities to public cloud. The appliance acts as a bridge between customers on-premise servers and the public cloud without compromising network security and efficiency. Its dual power source, network ports and hot backup disc also ensures a safe and stable operating environment for users without consuming extra computing resources.
The Hybrid Cloud Storage Array (HCSA) appliance is an enterprise level storage. It blends in with the Alibaba Cloud storage service thereby connecting the local storage with the elastic, scalable and unlimited public cloud storage to create a smooth hybrid cloud environment with ease of operation. HCSA supports multiple hybrid cloud modes such as cloud caching, replication, tiering and snapshots with its fully redundant hardware design to ensure there is no single point of failure during operation. With HCSA, customers can easily implement cross team file management and collaboration, unified heterogeneous storage management, and storage extension from local server to public cloud.
To enable joint innovation and service delivery with hybrid cloud partners, Alibaba Cloud launched its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program to provide an ecosystem for capable partners to plan, design, and resell services to propel customers’ hybrid cloud adoption journey. Alibaba Cloud will also offer free technical resources to qualified partners under the program including free ZStack licenses with unlimited CPU cores.
The program includes current global partners such as DXC Technology, Equinix, HPE, NCS, Whale Cloud. European partners Arrow Electronics, Softline Group and APAC partners AsiaPac, B&Data, Blue Power Technology, Cloudify, CTC Global, DiGiCOR, and Sen Spirit.
In addition to the hardware appliances, Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its ZStack, a light-weight hybrid cloud solution which can be easily deployed to manage hardware in data centers, servers on the edge, and hybrid cloud environments across on-premises and Alibaba Cloud resources. Compared with traditional private and hybrid cloud solutions, Alibaba Cloud ZStack is more cost-efficient and scalable, and can be deployed from as few as a single node in 30 minutes and easily scale out to hundreds of servers when needed.
