OVHcloud to Lead in Shaping the Future of the Cloud

OVHcloud, the European cloud leader, today held its tenth anniversary Summit event, uniting its ecosystem in shaping the future of the cloud with more than 1,500 attendees at La Maison de la Mutualité in Paris.

At the 2023 Summit, OVHcloud Founder and Chairman Octave Klaba was joined on stage by OVHcloud CEO Michel Paulin, OVHcloud Chief Technology Officer Thierry Souche and OVHcloud Chief Product Officer Yaniv Fdida to reaffirm the purpose of the company: Innovation for Freedom. The company has maintained this vision and ambition for 24 years and it still drives its every move including the delivery of over 40 products in the Public Cloud universe through 8 different services : security, compute, storage, database, network services, analytics, AI and quantum.

From its first servers in 2003 using a bespoke water-cooling system, to AI and quantum computing, OVHcloud still stands for innovation, exploring new possibilities, delivering value, and paving the way for the whole industry.

A robust growth trajectory, blazing a trail to the future

With solid full year 2023 financial results published just a month ago, the Group has demonstrated its ability to deliver double-digit growth in a challenging global context setting an ambitious outlook for the new fiscal year and answering today’s cloud market challenges. Always reinventing itself, the cloud has become the center of everything and a fundamental building block of every innovation from data analytics to AI and quantum. To serve this bold reality, the Group detailed a number of initiatives spanning through several key differentiators, including the development of brand-new AI solutions to further complete its PaaS portfolio.
A Trusted Cloud: third SecNumCloud datacenter and new SNC product roadmap

The need for a trusted cloud has never been so critical, with cloud now being key to many industries and administrations, serving as a vehicle for innovation, bringing unparalleled compute power to the fingertips of any individual on earth. Easily accessible and yet affordable, the cloud by OVHcloud is now home to an unprecedented breadth of data types from financial statements, income data, entertainment, health data, business intelligence, intellectual property, backups and so on.

In this context, the need to protect data and services has become a top challenge for businesses and the public sector, resulting in a growing number of regulations that strengthen user confidence in the cloud. OVHcloud has always promoted a trusted, transparent, and secure cloud offering the highest levels of data protection and has invested in certifications such as ISO 27001, ISO 27701, C5 in Germany and AGID in Italy.

For sensitive verticals like healthcare, the Group has long offered services granting the HDS (Health Data Hosting) certification. This certification should evolve in the year to come to offer more transparency to users and strengthen data protection against extraterritorial laws. The Group announced HDS certification is now available for most of its Public Cloud portfolio of 40 products.

Being one of France’s earliest champions of ANSSI’s SecNumCloud qualification, the highest certification in the world offering cloud customers the guarantee that their services are fully protected against foreign (non-EU) access, OVHcloud now has more than 80 clients using SecNumCloud qualified infrastructures. Further demonstrating its commitment towards the SecNumCloud qualification and answering growing demand from both public sector and businesses alike, the Group continues to invest significantly, including:

• In December 2023, OVHcloud is set to open a third SecNumCloud Data Center in Gravelines, France, joining the existing SecNumCloud Data Centers located in Roubaix and Strasbourg, France answering growing demands from its customers base;
• A new Bare Metal SecNumCloud offer is in the works and the Group has just begun its SecNumCloud qualification procedure with ANSSI;
• The Group plans to further extend the SNC qualification to its IaaS and PaaS offers starting with enabling its PaaS solutions portfolio in the Public Cloud universe including Kubernetes, databases, Data Platform and the most recent AI Solutions

Furthermore, OVHcloud plans to leverage its investments from a technical standpoint, so that it benefits all clients, partners, and software developers at a global level. At a European level, the Group is currently actively promoting the adoption of a European Union Certification Scheme (EUCS) that would replace national security certifications offering the same level of transparency and high protection against extraterritorial laws to cloud users.

A Sustainable Cloud for the Future: Big Data with a Small Footprint

For decades, OVHcloud has pioneered a sustainable cloud leveraging and refining unique innovations. The Group manufactures its own servers in two factories. OVHcloud’s excellence in design is combined with a custom-built water-cooling technology where water carries away the heat from servers’ hotspots, giving OVHcloud Data-Centers state-of-the-art performance indicators.

Nowadays, measuring the carbon footprint of IT equipment has become crucial with the Group having delivered a critically acclaimed feature with the Carbon Calculator. Clients can now get an estimate of the carbon footprint of their cloud consumption, including Scope 3, which takes into account the fact that most of a Data-Center footprint is tied to server operations and their production.

The OVHcloud Carbon Calculator provides Bare Metal and Hosted Private Cloud customers with their carbon footprint information from manufacturing to running of the infrastructure run (scope 1, 2, 3). Enriching the current methodology, the Group will add lifecycle assessment data to the carbon calculator, starting January 2024. The company is the only cloud provider to offer complete life cycle analysis at a component level on top of the carbon footprint of the cloud service consumption.

A Cloud Native Platform totaling over 40 products

OVHcloud continues to develop the breadth of its PaaS offers, thanks to a growing portfolio of products and services. Executing on a bold product roadmap, the Group has delivered a staggering number of products over the past few months. Products like Metal Instances, Cold Archive or the highly anticipated OVHcloud IAM have successfully launched over the past year. Adding to the list of over 40 products, with Public Cloud on a fast-paced growth trajectory, the Group announced brand new solutions:

• New Compute Instances: Available now, OVHcloud’s new compute instances are powered by AMD EPYC processors and tackle new use-cases for workloads requiring either a balanced mixed of processor/memory/storage (General Purpose B3), high-performance many cores processing (Compute Optimized C3) and fast memory data processing (Memory Optimized R3)
• New Block Storage & File Storage: Public Cloud will soon benefit from Block Storage with NVMe over fabric enabled storage options for use-cases where I/O is crucial, with a Beta version available now. The new File Storage service will allow for storing files in Public Cloud
• New Managed MongoDB: Designed with MongoDB, the new managed offer comes with a free tier so developers can now effortlessly start, test, and explore MongoDB in a trusted cloud environment before scaling their projects on a production tier, each with predictive pricing and excellent performance/price ratio.
• Network novelties: New layer 3 network services combining floating IP, load balancing and gateways as well as new vRack Endpoint to address use cases around Netapp.
• Security Dashboard: The OVHcloud Manager will soon benefit from a dashboard view representing key security events intercepted by the Group top-of-the-line Anti-DDoS mitigation algorithms so that clients have a better understanding of their exposure to online threats.
• Key Management Service: Managed service to administer encryption keys in order to protect customers data from within OVHcloud services and applications. Allowing both generation and lifecycle of encryption keys, OVHcloud KMS is now available as an Alpha version on OVHcloud Labs.
• Improved Public Cloud customer experience: Public Cloud customers will soon experience various quality of life improvements in their overall journey.
• Rancher for heavily containerized workloads: Facilitating hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios, the Group will soon launch its Managed Rancher service providing easy to use solutions to effortlessly manage Kubernetes clusters through Rancher single pane of glass.

The breadth of the Public Cloud products portfolio will be made available on-premises by the Group, for customers to access those services in their own data-centers.

AI PaaS solutions on AI-ready infrastructures

Developing a comprehensive suite of PaaS solutions for AI, the Group offers AI Notebooks, AI Training and AI Deploy to accompany the complete data lifecycle from ideation to production of ML models. OVHcloud AI solutions act as a thorough set of managed services that are easy to use and designed to explore data with AI Notebooks, train models with AI Training and finally deploy and serve them into production with AI Deploy. Targeting data scientists, the Group launched the final version of AI Deploy earlier this year, as part of its AI solutions.

Now offered with pre-trained models from a variety of partners, including Lettria and Voxist, AI Deploy benefits from new rendering options. Developing an AI enabled infrastructure, OVHcloud recently added an unprecedented number of NVIDIA GPUs including H100, A100, L40S, L4, A10 & H100 SXM5 (for select customers) available through dedicated GPU instances and for select GPU as rendering options for AI Deploy.

AI with data that stays your data

Over the course of a year that has been taken by storm by generative AI, OVHcloud set itself on a mission to help customers grow their businesses, uniting an ecosystem through innovative, easy, and affordable AI solutions, featuring transparent, ethical and open models that preserve data privacy.

To execute on its promise to make AI widely accessible, the Group today announced brand new solutions:

• OVHcloud Data Platform: A new end-to-end data platform to deliver a unique low code solution for management of the data pipeline and analytics. It provides customers with a complete and smooth experience for their data journey offering the availability to collect (with more than 50 available connectors), store, manage, analyze, and visualize data. Furthermore, the new solution also ensures that data is secure from unauthorized accesses and breaches while complying with laws and regulations. With the OVHcloud Data Platform, data scientists and business analysts can start new projects in just a few clicks by selecting information of interest in the Data Lakehouse. The solution is aimed at use cases like CRM enhancement or streamlined inventory management. A preview is available today on OVHcloud Labs.

• OVHcloud AI App Builder: Available today as an Alpha version, AI App Builder is a fully managed serverless solution providing an easy way to build contextualized generative AI apps and chatbots. The tool allows customers to input their private datasets in a secured cloud environment, select cutting-edge LLM with just a single click and finally deploy code ready to use for their application.

• OVHcloud AI Endpoints: This new solution facilitates access to general-purpose AI models through simple API endpoints, making AI a commodity requiring little knowledge on the customer’s side. Leveraging OVHcloud infrastructure, AI Endpoints fully respects data privacy (input/output) all while providing an excellent performance-price ratio. Targeted towards developers and integrators, AI Endpoints will host dozens of AI models at launch with a playground to test them before placing API calls.

A Cloud with outstanding performance-price ratio

To succeed in the digital age, businesses not only need a trusted and sustainable cloud, but they also need a predictable cloud. For years, OVHcloud has contributed to making cutting edge technologies accessible to as many as possible. Whether it’s storage, database, computer or GPU instances, the company’s solutions are designed from the ground up to offer an unmatched performance-price ratio.

Walking the talk, OVHcloud Object Storage benefits from competitive pricing, now cutting bills by up to a third. Recent independent market studies highlighted OVHcloud Object Storage price advantage (Cloud Mercato benchmark) while its VPS range has been recognized as offering best performance for the buck by VPSbenchmarks¹.

Tackling new use cases with Bare Metal Cloud

The Group is refreshing its complete Bare Metal Cloud portfolio offering even more choice and unlocking new use cases such as Grid Computing. Scale Second Generation, announced earlier this month, brings an unprecedented level of computer power thanks to a perfect blend of technologies with AMD and NVIDIA processors, the latter for the SCALE-GPU variant. With AMD EPYC processors code named “Bergamo”, OVHcloud Bare Metal SCALE-a8 boasts 256 cores and 512 threads in a 2P configuration.

The Group’s most advanced Bare Metal Cloud lines will be refreshed in the spring 2024 leveraging the latest generation of x86 chips from both AMD and Intel. The HGR line-up will be offered with NVIDIA L40S data center GPU for workloads such as machine learning, big data and inference.

Rise and Eco-range solutions will be updated throughout the year 2024, with even more performance on the network side of the house.

There is no progress if it is not shared: OVHcloud’s vibrant ecosystem

From its early beginnings to present day, OVHcloud has worked tirelessly to build an ecosystem where sharing successes is key. For the past three years, the Group has developed dedicated programs to boost its markets and accelerate innovation cycles. The Startup Program counts more than 3,700 startups and provides its participating members with unique mentoring, network opportunities as well as training, how-to’s and webinars to unlock the latest cloud innovations. Among the Startup Program members are flagship names like Gladia and Lighton.

Over the years, leveraging its unique vertically integrated industrial model, the Group has forged a variety of technical partnerships. Working closely with technological market leaders, OVHcloud secures its supplies, software or hardware, making sure it offers the most innovative solutions.

Finally, OVHcloud ecosystem also includes system integrators as well as MSPs through the Partner Program. Powerhouse names like Cap Gemini, Accenture CGI, Klee, Inetum and Deloitte resonate in the Partner Program, not forgetting Sopra Steria.

International Expansion

Expanding its global presence, with 38 Data centres across 4 continents, the Group now generates 52% of its revenue outside of France. As such, OVHcloud continues to deliver on its Data Centre roadmap to better serve its customers in line with its strategic plan. With the recent opening of SGP2, the Group added 2MW capacity in the APAC region.

This region will also host a new site in Sydney, SYD3, by spring 2024 while India will soon benefit from new capacity in its dedicated Mumbai Data Centre. In America, Canada will benefit from a new Data Centre in Toronto, TOR1 scheduled for a go-live in March 2024. Additional capacity is expected at BHS9, a site currently in construction, opening in 2025.

The Group is adding capacity in France with the opening in Roubaix of RBX10 and in Gravelines GRA4 starting with new SecNumCloud offer as detailed. OVHcloud is set to open its first Region 3-AZ serving Paris with sites 10km and 30km apart, benefiting from different power and network sources. This added resiliency will serve mission critical workloads with a go live expected in the first quarter of 2024. Starting with Bare Metal dedicated servers available in Region 3-AZ, this new zone will quickly host Object Storage 3AZ, providing customers with unprecedented choices when it comes to storing their data.

OVHcloud recently acquired the German technology provider Gridscale to enable new deployment models to accelerate its international expansion. With Gridscale’s technology, the Group can project its savoir faire within days in brand new international locations in an elegant simplicity. Extending the Public Cloud universe at the edge, new Local Zones are bound to be launched starting with more than 18 new Local Zones through the EMEA, USA and ROW regions in the coming months, targeting a total of 150 new local zones in the next three years. The first two Local Zones, leveraging Gridscale’s technology, are located in Madrid and Brussels with a staged roll out in the coming weeks. These zones offer a set of services including computing, file, block, and network including Public IP.

Building on the next Quantum century

Championing Quantum Computing in the cloud ecosystem, OVHcloud continues to be at the forefront of a nascent ecosystem tirelessly adding resources and tools to ignite development efforts. With dedicated hardware and the recent purchase of Quandela’s quantum computer powered by a photonic processor, the Group already offers several Quantum notebooks helping the ecosystem to get ready for how to program software for tomorrow’s quantum computers. The company is also adding two new notebooks with Alice & Bob Felis available now and Pulser from Pasqal launching December, for a total of 5 notebooks available by the end of 2023.

1. VPSbenchmarks, October 2023 study, all rights reserved: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/best_vps/october_2023