Pyotr Shcheglov: Selectel Lab opens ample opportunities for access to the latest technologies

Pyotr Shcheglov: Throughout a trend of previous years the market of data centers develops rather actively. On services of DPC demand from the large companies remains, many of them move the computing resources to commercial platforms. Along with it infrastructure requirements of cloud providers grow: some grow up from own data centers, others initially stake on lease of capacities. The foreign companies doing business in Russia also make the contribution to market development. Following requirements of the legislation, they move the corporate information systems to local platforms. All this promotes further accumulation of capacities in the Russian DPCs.

Pyotr Shcheglov: Growth of the Russian market of data centers will continue. However already today there are high-quality changes, and demand is quickly displaced from rather simple service of placement of the equipment of the company in commercial data center (colocation) on lease of computing resources of different types (IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service) - from dedicated servers to virtual private clouds. Customers understand that transition to lease of infrastructure allows to transfer to discharge of operating expenses not only equipment procurements, but also software licenses. Meanwhile, service providers of IaaS increase the level of utilization of servers due to use of technologies of virtualization and are capable to offer clients the interesting prices of computing resources. As a result for most of clients lease of IT infrastructure is economically justified. Especially great interest call services with tariffing by the principle of "Pay-as-you-go" when payment is made only for actually used computing resources.

Operators of data centers will still provide also the classical services to colocation, both traditional clients, and providers of IaaS services. In this light the best positions appear at operators with geographically distributed network of data centers and powerful communication channels because such partners are of bigger interest to IaaS-providers.

At last, it is impossible to forget about essentially new directions, for example, "foggy" calculations which develop on a wave of interest in a blockchain. In Selectel we work on a pilot project in this area and we consider that in the future there can be new solutions which will enter the competition to traditional infrastructure of data centers.

Pyotr Shcheglov: Without generalizing, I will tell that we aim to offer as much as possible wide range of products and services with the high level of customization. At the same time we place emphasis on partnership with world leaders of IT market together to create qualitative solutions.

In 2017 we started a new control panel services which considerably increased comfort and speed of the order of services, carried out upgrade of our cloud storage, increased capacities of a virtual private cloud of Selectel VPC. Information security support therefore we had new partners and solutions for protection of servers against network attacks becomes a relevant call. Besides the growing requests of customers push us constantly to upgrade the data centers.

As I already spoke, the IaaS market dynamically grows, and we already see that review of the affiliate program of Selectel with the emphasis on cooperation with system integrators and providers of IaaS-services was the right decision. Within joint projects we began to provide to customers more computing resources, it is more than place, it is more than services.

With a number of technology partners we started Selectel Lab — a special zone in which the newest technologies of vendors are available to free testing. Thanks to this zone everyone has an opportunity to test new solutions on the tasks and to make the weighed decision on their use.

Pyotr Shcheglov: In spite of the fact that the project is started only in August, Selectel Lab dynamically develops, and several customers already made the decision on lease of the most modern equipment, having tested it alive. We began with several solutions of Intel company, in particular the promising Intel Xeon Scalable platform, but now in a test zone there are already both network services Wallarm, and means of backup based on the products Veeam, and the cloud MyOffice system.

Pyotr Shcheglov: Both our acting clients, and the new companies, it is interesting to them to get acquainted with the most modern technologies come to a test zone. Among using possibilities of Selectel Lab there are both commercial organizations, and scientific. There is no uniform portrait of testing, but there is one integrating line: most of residents lacks the existing resources for the solution of the current tasks.

In general we are open for all who want to understand variety of modern IT solutions and to select an optimal variant from available among the products Selectel. But sometimes we should refuse testing. We do not allow to tests of loner miners who expect to receive the high-performance computing system on few weeks and to get to ourselves a little more kriptokoin.

Pyotr Shcheglov: Intel is our key partner in hardware solutions. And as terms of start of our test zone matched release of a number of new products of Intel – Xeon Scalable processors, the disks Optane, controllers Xeon Phi and FPGA – we could propose at once to customers the most modern solutions. The offer to include these products got a full support from Intel in Selectel Lab. It is curious that requests for testing of these new products come to us including from Europe where they for the present in deficit.

Pyotr Shcheglov: Any products and solutions which are used in infrastructure of our data centers pass long test in the conditions which are brought closer to "fighting". During testing we densely interact with vendor as much as possible to adapt the device for our needs. Separately there is an analysis of economy of work with a new product, abilities to integrate into our management systems and so on. It concerns both the engineering systems, and network equipment, and computing platforms, and the software.

The modern cloud reality requires to count each step and to estimate its economic feasibility. Eventually, we need to offer the customer the most profitable and reliable service, and for this purpose it is necessary to select carefully not only hardware solutions, but also software products. Fortunately, and proprietary platforms, such as VMware, and open source code systems, including OpenStack, provide practically at once support of new products of leading manufacturers of hardware solutions. In particular, the new Intel Xeon Scalable platform provided to Selectel Lab, gives a repeated gain of performance in real tasks of our customers already now.