The Next Generation of On-Demand Private Cloud

Updated on March 11, 2024 by OpenMetal

OpenMetal Creates a New Cloud Segment

OpenMetal, a division of InMotion Hosting (IMH), launches a disruptive new platform that is the next generation of private clouds by enabling IT teams, regardless of size or cloud expertise, to deploy OpenStack private clouds in under 45 seconds. Read this story to see how the On-Demand Private Cloud was born at InMotion Hosting and how the product has transformed into the next generation of private cloud.

Early 2020, InMotion Hosting Internal Teams Recognized a Need for Small-Medium-Sized Businesses

If you’ve been following InMotion Hosting’s journey for the last two years, you’ve had the opportunity to witness the company enter and scale through the Infrastructure as a Service and Cloud markets! If you’re new here, I’m going to recap you on what the teams have worked on. It’s going to get technical at times, but I’ll keep those parts brief so you can enjoy the journey. 

Why Private Cloud? Why OpenStack? Why now?

Up until this point, InMotion Hosting has always worked with smaller and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Our goal was to enable these small businesses to adopt a private cloud with smaller clouds versus one large, enterprise cloud. We’ve been using OpenStack software internally for many years now, and it was quite a learning experience. We realized if our teams are experiencing this, with an extensive engineering and developer background, who else is experiencing this? How can we make it better?

With small businesses’ needs’ and internal needs driving us, we were aiming to design a private cloud product with the following features:

  • Production grade OpenStack on Ceph on a 3 server footprint.
  • Spin up in 20 minutes.
  • Add additional servers in another 20 minutes.
  • Private control plane.
  • Usage-based billing by the hour.
  • Keep the costs low and absolutely, ABSOLUTELY, beat the TCO of running on the mega clouds. This cost would include your team budget. 

Over the course of 2020, we announced various releases that we accomplished and revamped along the way. When you’ve experienced growth, have you ever ignored optimization or pivoting? We made sure to leverage our partnerships, customers, and internal resources to fully develop the next generation of private cloud. It is a product that performed well in the market while keeping our customers’ needs top of mind.

October 2020, Flex Metal Cloud Release V0.9.3, in summary:

  • We achieved a hyper-converged OpenStack and Ceph on both a “small” and “standard” setup. I think our Co-Founder may have shed a tear on this day – don’t ask him though, he’ll deny it. 
  • We haven’t reached our production time of 20 minutes yet. We hit 37 minutes though! That’s a lot better than an hour, right? We have quite a few health checks in the system for Dev purposes. Hitting that 20-minute spin-up time is less important than ensuring Devs are secure.
  • We are also on the verge of adding additional servers in another 20 minutes. We are thinking big about this feature, we want you to think a couple of minutes!
  • We have a private control-plane! Rather, YOU have a private control-plane! A private control plane is required to truly have private infrastructure that a customer can modify as they see fit. Need another OpenStack service? Add it. Want to configure something anytime you want. You change it. Want to automate the control plane? Well, it is yours, so you do as you wish. 
  • Even though decommissioning full hardware can be tricky, we’ve made usage-based billing by the hour possible! We plan to keep streamlining this process in the near future.
  • Believe it or not, we managed to beat the TCO of running on the mega clouds! Our pricing calculator went live. Our beta customers were thrilled!
  • We also joined the OpenStack Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor! 

November 2020, Flex Metal Cloud Release V0.9.9, in summary:

  • We are refining our 3 server footprint to include 5 servers as the “Cloud Core”. This means 5 servers providing control plane services. 
  • We have changed our spin-up time from 20 minutes to 45 minutes. We realized we were being optimistic and wanted to be logical to ensure the right health checks stayed in place. 
  • However, now you can add additional servers in under 15 minutes, and even add multiple servers in parallel!
  • The OpenStack Foundation held a virtual OpenStack Summit this month, two really exciting things happened!

Early 2021, InMotion Hosting Announces General Availability

The time has come! The wait is over! The Private Cloud product was live! 

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., Feb. 24, 2021 / InMotion Hosting established a foothold in the IaaS and Private Cloud markets by announcing the general availability of the Flex Metal Cloud IaaS product. Flex Metal Cloud offered an On-Demand Private Cloud powered by OpenStack, an open-source infrastructure platform. 

The drivers in 2021 will include automating provisioning, improving customer journeys, enhancing pricing structures, and utilizing our customer base to take the product to the next level. Read the press release here for more information!

The goals from the 2020 releases are still the drivers to make this happen, but there are some new things to be aware of:

  • Opening up Free Timed Trials for all users.
  • OpenStack Private Clouds that can be spun up and down easily.

Read more about the Flex Metal Cloud Release V1.1 here.

Taking the Product to the Next Level

Since announcing the Private Cloud’s general availability, we still kept listening to our partners, customers, and internal teams. Over the next few months we set out to do the following:

The product has reached a point where we realized it was the right time to separate from InMotion Hosting’s website and create our own path! 

2022: The Next Generation of Private Clouds are On-Demand

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA – March 15, 2022 – OpenMetal is seeking to transform the IaaS and cloud landscape by rolling out OpenMetal On-Demand Private Clouds (powered by OpenStack) designed to deliver a true “as-a-service” private cloud that is accessible and affordable to small teams and enterprise organizations.

Incubated from InMotion Hosting’s Flex Metal Cloud solution, this next-generation OpenMetal platform challenges OpenStack’s common perceptions of setup complexity, mass IT staff resource allocation for operation, and high risks of failure. OpenMetal On-Demand Private Clouds start off with a 3 server hyper-converged cloud core already warmed up and ready to be deployed for service in under 45 seconds and billed on an hourly basis. This makes builds and deployments, even very small clouds on OpenStack, trivial to deploy and easy to scale up and down on demand.

“When it comes to choosing cloud, private clouds have always been the gold standard for greater control over security and costs, but complicated to set up.” said Todd Robinson, President of OpenMetal. “When these setups fail, it weakens the open source community around OpenStack. To drive greater adoption of open source systems, we felt it was imperative to simplify setup and ease the adoption of OpenStack. With OpenMetal, any company, regardless of size or skill, can now spin up on-demand private clouds with no risk or wait.“

OpenMetal’s commitment to the open-source community includes a Silver Foundation Membership in the Open Infrastructure Foundation and serving as an Infrastructure Donor to support projects like Zuul, a Project Gating System. OpenMetal will continue collaborating with the open infrastructure community to add new features and functionality. Together we plan to further simplify private cloud deployments, increase infrastructure flexibility, and ensure it remains a cost-effective open source choice over the mega public clouds.

Read the full press release to learn more.

Experience the Next Generation of Private Cloud for Yourself
Experience the ease and speed of building an OpenMetal On-Demand Private Cloud on OpenStack. Request an online test drive and limited-time trial. 

Looking for a Custom Open-Source Private Cloud?
OpenMetal offers large deployment and private pod solutions, customized to meet the unique needs of your organization by our engineering team. Explore the broader business benefits of OpenMetal by requesting a consultation and/or demo with our Customer Success team.

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