GNAX Takes On Verizon, Amazon With Free VMware-Powered Cloud Offer
GNAX is offering its new GNAX Cloud service for free. GNAX Cloud, which the Atlanta infrastructure provider launched last month, is among the first enterprise-grade multi-tenant cloud offerings in the U.S. powered by VMware vCloud Director.
GNAX Marketing Vice President Matt Mong said the free cloud promotion was designed to get VMware vCloud Director into the market and drive new customers to the platform.
"It's where VMware is going and where the industry is going," Mong said.
The GNAX Cloud lets users manage their entire virtual infrastructure though a Web interface to maximize resource utilization and enhance the security, reliability and flexibility of IT infrastructure. As a VMware partner, Mong said GNAX has the unique capability to offer its public cloud infrastructure and have it tie into customer private clouds that run VMware to get a true hybrid play.
According to Mong, GNAX competes directly against other cloud infrastructure players like Verizon-Terremark, Amazon, Rackspace and others. And instead of offering bundled packages, GNAX's paid cloud services offer a la carte cloud pricing that lets users pick the amounts of processing and compute power, storage and IPs to let them build their own cloud package.
As part of the free cloud promotion, GNAX said it will give away up to 1,000 virtual machines in the GNAX Cloud. The company said each free instance includes 2 GHz of processing power, 2 GB of RAM, 80 GB of storage, 4 TB of transfers per month and 2 public IP addresses. The GNAX Cloud comes standard with AppMonitor, an all-in-one Web application performance management tool that monitors the end-user experience in your Java, Ruby, PHP or .NET applications, GNAX said.
GNAX Cloud lets users provision virtual machines on demand; group virtual machines together into vApps for deployment and management; select and load server images from pre-defined sets; and secure infrastructure behind a virtual firewall.
Mong said that the free GNAX Cloud promotion isn't a free trial that expires after 30 days, like some competitors offer. There is no expiration date, but the free cloud offer is limited to the first 500 applications.