“Half a rack in half a day”

According to Broadband-Testing, “IT is essentially broken; the emergence of cloud computing—albeit itself a variation on similar past “outsourcing” themes—has created a dilemma for IT teams. Do they go with the “ease of use and scalability” that Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) evangelise about—and the costs associated with that route and loss of direct control over and visibility into their data and applications—or do they create their own next generation compute, storage and networking platform, AKA private and/or hybrid cloud?”

The concept of a “cloud type” experience within an OnPrem environment is appealing but one that is full of expensive and explosive potential minefields if attacked in a “DIY” manner. Put simply, the standard tools at our disposal are essentially the same ones that have been around for decades in the networking, storage, compute and security worlds. Moreover, they are still very much “islands of IT” in terms of integration. Creating your own version of an AWS or Azure, for example, is anything but trivial. At the same time, staying with a traditional, OnPrem solution is patently not the answer to scalability requirements and taking advantage of the new generation of cloud native applications and application building blocks—the DevOp era, we might call it.

SoftIron, with its HyperCloud platform, claims to have the answer to this conundrum, providing a “private cloud in a package” style solution for creating private and hybrid clouds. Key to its approach is in providing all the requirement elements within the one platform—secure compute, storage and networking with zero association with, or requirement of, the public cloud to deliver any elements of that solution. This differentiates it significantly from the various “as a service” solutions out there that provide scalable alternatives to traditional OnPrem IT, but are based wholly or partially within the public cloud for data and application access and delivery. Equally it differentiates itself from those providing the storage element of the private cloud—there are plenty of players there, large and small—by fully integrating the compute and networking elements.

Download the full report here, or read Steve Broadhead’s Computer Weekly blog here: Half A Rack In Half A Day: Building A Private Cloud.


Broadband-Testing is an independent testing operation, based in Europe. Broadband-Testing interacts directly with the vendor, media, analyst, consultancy and investment communities equally and is therefore in a unique space within IT.

Testing covers all aspects of a product/service from business rationalisation in the first instance to every element—from speed of deployment and ease of use/management, through to performance and accuracy.

Testing itself takes many forms, from providing due diligence for potential investors through to public domain test reports.

Broadband-Testing is completely vendor neutral and independent. If a product does what it says on the tin, then we say so. If it doesn’t, we don’t tell the world it does what it cannot do…The testing is wholly complementary to analyst-related reports; think of it as analysts getting their hands dirty by actually testing what’s on the latest hype curve to make sure it delivers on its claims and potential.

Broadband-Testing operates an Approvals scheme which prioritises products to be short-listed for purchase by end-users, based on their successful approval, and thereby short-cutting the evaluation process.

Output from the testing, including detailed research reports, articles and white papers on the latest IT technologies, are made available free of charge on our web site at www.broadband-testing.co.uk.

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