Savvis launches virtual private datacentres

Savvis is readying a cloud datacentre service

IT services firm Savvis will today unveil a new cloud computing offering designed to let enterprise customers build and manage a private datacentre in the cloud for operating their own IT services.

The new platform, codenamed Project Spirit, is to be officially announced at VMware's VMworld event in San Francisco. However, Savvis is still working with pilot users at the moment, and expects to start a beta in the fourth quarter of 2009, with general availability pegged for early 2010.

Unlike other cloud services, Project Spirit is the first enterprise-class private cloud platform, according to Savvis vice president of research and development David Shacochis.

"What we're building will allow enterprises to build all their services together as a virtual private datacentre. Customers will be able to put it together in our datacentre using all the familiar tools they use in the physical world. This is an industry first. There's nothing else out there like it," he said.

Customers will be able to build and manage their virtual private datacentre using a graphical user interface via the Savvis customer portal, and add or remove resources as necessary.

Pricing models are still being considered, according to Shacochis, but customers will be charged on an hourly basis, with cost depending on the resources used and the quality-of-service (QoS) level specified for different resources.

"For example, you might have a test application running on a low traffic plane, while a production application that your company depends on would be on a high traffic plane," explained Shacochis.

Cisco is a key technology partner in the project, according to Savvis, with Cisco Nexus switches used to provide a converged network all the way from the datacentre to any endpoint on the company's network.

Security is another key feature of the platform, as Savvis is taking advantage of VMware's VMsafe API to secure services, even traffic that is between virtual machines on the same server and does not pass across a physical network connection.

Shacochis contrasted Project Spirit with Microsoft's Azure cloud services, which are more of a platform-as-a-service for developing new applications, he said, while Amazon's EC2 platform lacks the tiered QoS, security and user interface Savvis is offering.

"The biggest distinction is that ours is a cloud datacentre. You can design your application architecture inside a much broader context," he said.