Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Internap for Bare-Metal Cloud Leadership

ATLANTA, March 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance Internet infrastructure services, today announced that research firm Frost & Sullivan has presented the company with the 2014 North American Cloud Services: Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award. Internap was recognized for its unique ability to meet the emerging infrastructure needs of a new generation of large-scale, performance-intensive applications through a combination of its bare-metal cloud offering, commitment to delivering a positive customer experience and hybrid portfolio, including colocation, hosting and cloud services.

The Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award honors the company with the most complete vision for a high-quality total customer experience and a creative and sustainable growth strategy. Frost & Sullivan pointed to Internap's bare-metal cloud offering as a key differentiator among competitors. While traditional virtualized cloud services deliver unprecedented levels of scalability and efficiency, organizations running real-time or data-intensive applications can face significant performance limitations due to the "noisy neighbor" effect of multi-tenancy and the added processing overhead of the hypervisor layer. Bare-metal clouds combine the performance and security of single-tenant, dedicated servers with the pay-as-you-go, on-demand provisioning associated with virtualized servers, resulting in consistently higher performance levels and greater cost-efficiencies at scale.

"As enterprises increase their reliance on data analytics and other performance-sensitive computing workloads, the market opportunity for bare-metal cloud will also grow. Internap's bare-metal cloud complements the company's traditional hosting and cloud services to deliver proven levels of throughput and performance, even for workloads not previously considered good candidates for cloud," said Lynda Stadtmueller, program director of cloud services at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan.  

Internap was selected based on reviews and analysis by Frost & Sullivan's research team, industry peers and an independent board of directors, as well as its Decision Support Scorecard methodology, which compared the performance of multiple companies including Internap, by weighting and ranking the following key benchmarking criteria:

1. Total Customer Experience – With a full range of colocation, hosting and public and private cloud services, Internap customers can build hybrid environments that maximize application performance. With Internap's single-pane-of-glass portal, customers can centrally manage workloads across infrastructure types and scale on-demand capacity as needed.
2. Product/Service Value – Since the concept of the bare-metal cloud is still new to most organizations, Internap is leading market education efforts to show the business value of its offering, including detailed price and performance comparisons with virtualized cloud services from other leading cloud providers. For example, in a recent Cloud Spectator benchmark review, the price-performance score for Internap's bare-metal cloud was more than six times higher than the nominal virtual offerings from leading competitors.
3. Service Experience – High-touch support services are a standard part of Internap's offering to help customers more effectively execute their bare-metal and broader cloud and infrastructure strategy. At the start of an engagement, Internap engineers help customers determine which infrastructure options will best fit their workloads and design an appropriate solution. Internap's 24x7 customer support is backed by live, skilled engineers available via phone, email or chat channels.
4. Navigational Positioning – Though Internap offers a full range of infrastructure services, including virtual public cloud, its strategy to position bare-metal cloud at the forefront is attracting and enabling customers with performance-sensitive applications, such as big data, to scale with speed, reliability and cost-efficiency. These customers can also seamlessly leverage other Internap colocation, hosting and cloud services to support additional workload and business needs.
5. Execution Excellence – Internap is able to validate the performance advantages for its bare-metal cloud servers. In the Cloud Spectator benchmark test, Internap's bare-metal servers performed eight times better than comparable virtualized services for general workloads, three times faster for MySQL workloads, and six times faster for file system performance. By continuing to publish independent test results, Internap showcases the strength of the bare-metal model in general, as well as its own offering.
6. Technological Sophistication – Internap's "Performance Platform" is robust, flexible, scalable and simple – supporting divergent customer and workload needs through the hybridization of Internap's bare-metal and virtual public cloud, colocation and hosting services, all powered by its global, high-performance IP connectivity and Content Delivery Network.

"The Frost & Sullivan award further validates our dedication to delivering unmatched performance and price advantages to our customers through a flexible, hybrid portfolio of cloud and other infrastructure services that can best fit their specific application needs," said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. "Our bare-metal cloud offering in particular has been instrumental in driving growth and scale for some of today's most exciting companies and innovative, performance-reliant applications."

Organizations in ad tech, big data, mobile and other markets that rely on performance-sensitive and data-intensive applications are increasingly turning to Internap's bare-metal cloud, including: big data platform provider eXelate, financial planning company LearnVest, website security provider Distil Networks, and mobile music streaming provider boinc.

Supporting resources:

• Frost & Sullivan's Competitive Strategy Innovation & Leadership Award Profile of Internap
• Frost & Sullivan industry report – Bare-Metal Cloud: A Non-Virtualized Cloud Option for Performance-Sensitive Workloads
• Cloud Spectator Performance Analysis: Benchmarks of Bare-Metal and Virtual Clouds
• Cloud Landscape Report: Price & Performance Obstacles Surface for Fast, Big Data Applications

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About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best in class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages over 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit www.frost.com.  

About Internap 
Internap is the high-performance Internet infrastructure provider that powers the applications shaping the way we live, work and play. Our hybrid infrastructure delivers performance without compromise – blending virtual and bare-metal cloud, hosting and colocation services across a global network of data centers, optimized from the application to the end user and backed by rock-solid customer support and a 100% uptime guarantee. Since 1996, the most innovative companies have relied on Internap to make their applications faster and more scalable. For more information, visit www.internap.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include statements related to the characteristics and performance of our services, including our bare metal cloud services and the benefits that our customers may receive from them. Because such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors include the actual performance of our products and services; the reaction and behavior of customers and the market to our products and services; our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; the availability of services from Internet network service providers or network service providers providing network access loops and local loops on favorable terms, or at all; failure of third party suppliers to deliver their products and services on favorable terms, or at all; failures in our network operations centers, data centers, network access points or computer systems; our ability to provide or improve Internet infrastructure services to our customers; and our ability to protect our intellectual property, as well as other factors discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Given these risks and uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results. We undertake no obligation to update, amend or clarify any forward-looking statement for any reason.

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SOURCE Internap Network Services Corporation