Micron21 cloud platform mCloud stacks up against the big players — and is ready to prove it. Photo: Micron21.
If, like most cloud users, you’re beholden to one of the big guys, chances are you’ve seen some eye-watering price hikes over the years — and there’s no need to put up with it.
Micron21 Head Of Customer & Commercial Sheldon Dyer says to understand how hard the “data price squeeze”, driven by inflationary pressures and vendors trying to hold their margins, has hit, you only need to look at major cloud computing software company VMware.
“When Broadcom acquired it in 2023, they went for a different business model, changing its licensing agreements to reduce its smaller customer footprint and drive higher margins from its top end.
“As a high-level partner, we were looking at a jump from $350,000 to $1.2 million to provide software through VMware. That was untenable.”
Micron21 took a long, hard look at whether they’d continue with VMware. Not only did it remain one of the best products in that space, but a lack of alternatives drove customers to it, especially bigger companies and government agencies with complex environments.
Instead, they bit the bullet and created their own platform — and mCloud is pulling no punches.
mCloud delivers public, private and hybrid cloud solutions with scalable compute, storage and networking. It operates from Australia’s first Tier IV data centre with full redundancy and synchronising data across three geographically separate locations.
The platform utilises OpenStack, an open-source cloud management system, and Ceph, a scalable storage solution, to provide businesses with flexibility, control, and cost-effective infrastructure.
All of this is backed by 24/7 support from Australian-based cloud specialists, ensuring smooth deployments and rapid troubleshooting.
In performance, reliability and cost efficiency, the platform is stacking up against what Sheldon calls the ‘Big Three’ — AWS, Azure and Google Cloud — and they’re happy to prove it.
“On our website, we have a pricing calculator where you can compare to the Big Three. It shows that by becoming a cloud provider ourselves with no middleman, we’re able to achieve economies of scale and bring our cost structure down — a lot,” Sheldon says.
“To give you an indicator, for the same service mCloud provides for $82, you’ll pay close to $500 with the Big Three.”
Using top-of-the-line high-speed Intel Xeon Gold computing power, high-performance NVMe SSD storage and ultra-fast 100Gbps networking, the price is compelling, but so is the product.
Unlike most other providers, it applies no constraints to storage, and its Tier IV data centre — the only sovereign commercial data centre in the market — provides unparalleled contingency, redundancy and resilience, with a 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee.
This is backed by a support plan offering 24/7 customer service, and an offer to do all the heavy lifting to migrate customers from their all-in-one “hyperconverged” data centre systems to mCloud.
They also offer a price-beat guarantee and a free trial, welcoming new customers to test the waters.
“In short, in price, capability and service, we’ve smashed it out of the ballpark — and we invite you to hold us to it,” Sheldon says.
For more information, or to trial how mCloud compares to anything else on the market, visit Micron21.
