ArcGIS Server Now Available As A Cloud Based Subscription

Earlier this year at the ESRI Federal User Conference 2010, ESRI announced a new and exciting relationship with Amazon Web Services. Information on this announcement can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/…

Since then there has been little information around this released publically but as we move closer to the release of ArcGIS 10, a subscription model is being offered to clients wanting to make use of the cloud.

ESRI announces that, for the first time, customers have the option to purchase a cloud-based subscription to ArcGIS Server, ESRI’s server-based geographic information system (GIS) software. With this option, users can purchase an annual subscription, which bundles a preconfigured ArcGIS Server instance on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure with 12 months of ESRI technical support and maintenance. ArcGIS Server Cloud Bundle expands ESRI’s growing cloud offerings and provides customers with another deployment option for ArcGIS Server.

The notion of running ArcGIS Server in the cloud is something new for many users that the benefits are extremely powerful.

Running ArcGIS Server in the cloud simplifies GIS server deployment and reduces the complexity of server management. It allows organizations to more rapidly meet larger-than-average workloads and demand by scaling up or down the number of ArcGIS Server instances without investing in new on-premises hardware. Users gain direct access to ArcGIS Server within minutes and can begin publishing services and supporting Web mapping applications immediately. ArcGIS Server Cloud Bundle is also a green computing option that allows organizations to reduce their overall energy consumption.

Note that this bundled offer is available to U.S. customers only at this stage. We’re working to see how we can offer it to our New Zealand based customers.

So what’s included in this bundle?

ArcGIS Server Cloud Bundle is an annual subscription to a preconfigured deployment of ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise running on a 4-core Windows Server 2008 virtual machine in the Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure.

The bundle includes

• Deployment of the annual ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise license on a virtual 4-core EC2 server based on the following configuration:
• 2.0 GHz processor per core
• 15 GB of memory
• 1,690 GB of storage
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 64-bit platform
• Documentation including a deployment guide and best practices
• 12 months of ESRI technical support and maintenance
• Online help

Customers with Enterprise Licence Agreements (ELA’s) can purchase the bundle at a special ELA discount and deploy their licences on Amazon virtual machines instead of on-premise computers.

Over the last few months I have been doing lots of work with ArcGIS Server and Amazon Web Services. This includes testing performance for both ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Server 10. From New Zealand we have a good idea now of performance. I have been able to successfully test ArcGIS Server running on ALL of the Amazon Web Services nodes as well. I’ll be posting more information around this in the next few weeks.

The press release around this announcement can be found here: http://www.esri.com/news/… and full information about this new cloud bundle can be found here: http://www.esri.com/partners/…