1STACK FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions of Starview Products and Services

What is 1STACK?

1STACK is an enterprise ready, viable alternative for private clouds. It is derived from OpenStack, a Cloud Operating System that delivers outstanding compute, storage and network performance without the premium pricing or the licensing lock ins.

Yes you can. If you are thinking of using existing servers, we discourage it and will not support it. Advancement in technologies in server hardware and performance have meant that it is most optimal to use the latest available to extract the maximum performance-price ratio. TCO over a 5-year life span is also lower if you use new machines.

It can be onsite or off-site at a data centre. However, the trend is to locate in a 3rd party data centre, because of highly designed physical security, resilence in power, cooling, connectivity.

We provide comprehensive support for hardware and parts replacement. We also provide 1STACK software support to ensure that continual patches are made available. As the cloud platform is considered a critical infrastructure, we intentionally design it in high availability, for it to continue to operate in pockets of failure. This allows us to downgrade majority of failures to non-critical, and to allow us flexible windows to perform repairs. We highly recommend a comprehensive support contract to be in place for the platform’s optimal performance.

We strive to deliver the best value that your budget can buy. Discuss with us, and we may be able to rationalise a feasible solution for you.

To extract the best value out of 1STACK, there are technical training courses available from 3rd party providers. We also provide training for you to be able to operate the cloud platform on a day-to-day basis.

If you have multiple cloud locations or sometimes called edge clouds, the management can be centralized in a single pane of glass.

As long as your software runs on a flavour of Windows OS or Linux OS supported by the hypervisor, we have migration tools to port over your software onto 1STACK.

In most cases, we expect a 5-year lifespan for hardware. This is because beyond 5 years, it is no longer economical to continue to support outdated systems.

Talk to us regarding your scope of IT management. Starview may be able to do it, or we may be able to introduce our partners to provide it.

Support of end device is not the function of 1STACK. It is the function of the software application that runs on 1STACK. If the application supports BYOD, CYOD, e.g. a VDI deployment, then 1STACK supports it.

Whether to use public cloud or private cloud is a very large topic by itself. Cost is one consideration, because it is always cheaper to start small in a public cloud, and then scale out as workloads increases. The cost inflection point happens with large workloads where it is cheaper to own your private cloud. Also, some businesses are highly regulated, where compliance prevents data from being stored in a public infrastructure. Many companies however, operate a hybrid cloud model, where majority of workloads are in private cloud, and the public cloud provides the extension of capacity and resources when the private cloud is at or near full capacity.

1STACK is based on OpenStack, an open source project. Therefore there is no licenses to buy except for vGPU License if you require it. We charge for annual support. Support is based on the number of nodes in the cloud infrastructure. Therefore, we always design the cloud to use the highest core CPUs available, to reduce the nodes and support costs. Some other commercial cloud software license is based on the number of cores, eg max 32-cores. If you have a node with 64-cores CPU, you will need 2 licenses, even though there is only 1 physical server.

1STACK and OpenStack is designed to separate the management plane from the user plane. The management plane is the adminstrative access to to 1STACK. This access should be highly secured and controlled with the policies consistent with the organization.

The application runs in a publicly accessible user plane. Security hardening can be performed by blocking unused services in the OS where the application runs in. In addition, firewalling, WAFs, load balancing etc, can be installed in front of the application to provide additional protection.

We envisage HPC to be built in an architecture similar to a private cloud. Exciting innovations are being tested out, such as composable systems from GigaIO. Composable systems allow us to dynamically define and build hardware systems in software, by assembling building blocks such as storage, CPUs, GPUs, accelerators (eg FPGSs), persistent memory, CPUs etc. These building blocks can be returned to the pool after use, for reuse by other applications.

Minimum of 3 HCI nodes, TOR 100G switches (x2) and 1G management switches (x2). We recommend 4 HCI nodes to start with. Storage nodes are configured according to sizing requirements. There is a minimum of 3 storage nodes required for high availability design.

Yes. In fact, there are so many commercial appliances out there today where the underlying OS is RHEL or Centos. Everyone is exposed to zero day vulnerability. Therefore purchase of a comprehensive support program is important, so that patches can be made available to fix vulnerabilities as soon as they are available.

If you have a preferred hardware brand, we can support it. But if you are thinking of repurposing old hardware, we will not support it. 1STACK is based on open source OpenStack, so there is no license to buy. We only charge for setup and annual support fees.