Oct 19, 2017 - Today OVH, the global, hyperscale cloud provider, announces FPGA-based Acceleration-as-a-Service, based on the Intel® Programmable Acceleration Card (Intel PAC) with Intel® Arria® 10 GX FPGA, and in partnership with Accelize.® The QuickStore® Marketplace offers customers a choice of ready-to-use, optimised software which integrates seamlessly with the Intel FPGA-based acceleration platform.

OVH led the industry in offering workload acceleration with the ease and granularity of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), exposing the functionality through an API, in close collaboration with the Accelize QuickStore and the Intel FPGA-based acceleration platform. Customers will be able to select optimised accelerator functions to accelerate compute-intensive tasks such as search, compression, cryptography, video transcoding, and machine learning. The service will be initially available in the OVH Public Cloud based on OpenStack, another industry-first, and later expanded to other OVH Cloud offerings.

“OVH is leveraging Intel’s FPGA accelerator solutions to bring the performance and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of FPGA acceleration to their customers,” said John Sakamoto, Vice President and General Manager, of the Data Center and Communications Division in the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel Corporation. “By utilising Accelize’s market-specific accelerator functions, OVH’s customers in Europe and North America can quickly deploy FPGA acceleration for a wide variety of data-intensive applications.”

“We are pleased to see that together with OVH and Intel, we can make FPGAs available to a much broader audience, regardless of their FPGA expertise”, says Jean-Yves Brena, Accelize CEO. “Through this collaboration our QuickAlliance ecosystem members can now bring their solutions to the OVH Cloud customers seamlessly.”

This innovative offering brings a new dimension in terms of speed, cost and flexibility to address the enormous diversity of workloads running in OVH datacentres worldwide.  “We are constantly seeking solutions offering the highest performance for our customers’ applications,” says Germain Masse, OVH Technical Director. “We are proud to be at the forefront of FPGA technologies in partnership with Intel and Accelize.”

OVH plans to run Proofs-of-Concept with key customers in 2017, and to make Acceleration-as-a-Service broadly available in the first quarter of 2018.