Bigstep Nominated as Most Innovative Enterprise Product of the Year

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and Cloud Pro have announced the Shortlist for the UK Cloud Awards 2016. Bigstep is competing for the ”Most Innovative Enterprise Product of the Year” Award. We are honored to have been nominated for this award along with three exceptional companies: Okta, Pink Telephone Company and Thoughtonomy.

This is our second application for the UK Cloud Awards, an event which celebrates the leading cloud suppliers, technologies and projects in the UK. Our first application brought us a prize we cherish to this day – Newcomer of the Year 2014.

Here is part of the application that brought us this year’s nomination:

Why is it different?

Our Full Metal Cloud is a big data platform-as-a-service which empowers businesses to easily set up and manage big data architectures within a high-performance, highly secure, and easily scalable bare metal environment. The platform completely automates and orchestrates infrastructure and software integration, deployment and scaling, configuration and tuning, dependency management, application interconnection, and upgrade management.

Through a drag-and-drop user interface, the platform offers control over these distinct technology layers:

The big data application layer

The Full Metal Cloud platform integrates an extensive stack of enterprise-grade big data applications, such as MapR, Cloudera CDH, Hortonworks, Datameer, Tableau, Exasol, DataStax, Couchbase, Splunk, Elastic, and Mesos. New big data applications are constantly being added, and the platform ensures their full compatibility.

The infrastructure layer

This is fully scalable and uses no hypervisor, so it provides all the power of bare metal combined with the flexibility of the cloud. Its architecture makes it uniquely suited to deliver high computational power, high I/O and high throughput for big data workloads, while maintaining an excellent privacy and security level. This allows big data applications running on Bigstep’s infrastructure to register performance improvements of 20 – 80% worst case, and of 300 – 500% in the best case.

The Full Metal Cloud has the following key features:

Seamlessly integrated big data apps

The Full Metal Cloud platform integrates the world’s most valued big data applications and ensures their full compatibility. Even for technologies that are not currently part of the big data application layer, a single install is needed to create a template, which can then be used to deploy hundreds of instances.

Big data made easy

Using a single intuitive interface, users can readily drag-and-drop all the components needed to build a high-performance, enterprise-grade big data environment. From concept to production, creating a production-ready big data architecture on The Full Metal Cloud takes only a few minutes and a few clicks. Every component is ready to be deployed, scaled and connected.

Software-defined bare metal infrastructure

The platform provides the ability to easily create, deploy and scale physical infrastructures with no human intervention.

Native high performance

The accelerated bare metal environments, fully isolated wire-speed networks and high-performance storage systems are architected together to crunch your data faster than any other platform to date. The Full Metal Cloud is the world’s highest-performance public cloud.

Highly secure environment

Bigstep is ISO 20000, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, CSA and G-Cloud-7 certified. The Full Metal Cloud is designed to provide enterprise-grade security for critical data sets. Bigstep has industry-leading data centers in the United Kingdom, Germany and is in the process of opening a USA data center.

Native platform services

The Full Metal Cloud integrates the following native managed services:

• The world’s first Data Lake as a Service – A scale-out, affordable HDFS-compatible storage system;
• Spark Array – Managed in-memory processing using Spark;
• Container Array – Managed high-performance, multi-task Docker infrastructure.

Flexible pricing models

We have developed both on-demand and reserved pricing models, to ensure the best possible price-performance offerings in today’s market.

On Thursday, April 12th, we will find out if we are going to win another UK Cloud Award. Good luck to all the nominees!