New Argon Cloud Jumpstart Delivers a Complete Power On Ready Microsoft Private Cloud at a Low Price Point

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - December 10, 2015) - Argon Systems Inc. and SecureGUARD Gmbh in partnership has today released the Argon Cloud Jumpstart, a complete Azure Private Cloud in a single small enclosure. The Argon Cloud Jumpstart product is designed to meet a price point under thirty-thousand dollars USD which allows companies to bring up a private cloud quickly, and makes Proof-of-Concept projects affordable.

The Argon Cloud Jumpstart is a complete Microsoft Private Cloud based on the Microsoft Cloud Platform and the SecureGUARD Unified Cloud Block technologies and include compute servers, storage, switches and supporting infrastructure in a very small rack enclosure. Cloud features include Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V clusters for server virtualization, tiered and RAID high-performance storage, multi-tenancy network virtualization, Microsoft System Center services and the Azure Pack management portal. The Argon Cloud Jumpstart can be administered with a similar look-and-feel as Azure but is located and managed on premises by the company's IT department.

Ready to use at power on, the product is a fully functional private cloud, read to spin up Windows or Linux Virtual Machines and run a customer's workload.

"Every cloud customer we have engaged with has requested an affordable cloud infrastructure to test in their own IT environment," said Robert Keith, Argon's CEO. "Building a cloud infrastructure has been expensive and complex. The Jumpstart is a complete cloud, with all the major features of Azure at the price of a typical network router or switch."

"Getting started with cloud, building complex technologies at customer sites has been a major roadblock to many cloud deployments," said Helmut Otto, SecureGUARD Managing Director. "We see the Jumpstart product as a major enabler for our customers planning on rolling out private clouds."

The Jumpstart is an affordable Proof-of-Concept environment to run and test an enterprises applications in a cloud environment. Applications can be tested in a virtualized multi-tenant cloud environment to guarantee they function correctly with great performance and reliability. The system can also be used to stage the application environment prior to production. The Jumpstart cloud environment can be used as a complete production environment for smaller companies, or can be extended with additional Argon Cloud products which then can scale to any size. The next release of Argon Cloud products are based on Windows 2016 with Storage Spaces Direct and include 100 Gigabit Ethernet data network paths and advanced NVM Express storage. The Jumpstart provides a technology path for these new products scheduled to be released next year.

Argon Systems Inc. designs, delivers and supports Microsoft Private Clouds anywhere. Based in San Jose, CA, the Argon Systems has years of experience with the Microsoft Cloud Platform and large scale complex infrastructure deployments. Argon Systems has developed several patented cloud technologies to automate the architecture, deployment, management and support for cloud infrastructures and ships pre-integrated "ready to run" private cloud systems.

SecureGUARD Gmbh is a Microsoft Gold OEM Partner, Windows Server Embedded Partner and a Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Partner. Headquartered in Linz, Austria, SecureGUARD has been building Windows security and network products for over 10 years and more recently rack-level converged cloud infrastructure products. Managing Director Helmut Otto is a two-time Microsoft MVP award winner for Windows Server in 2014 and 2015.