Savvis enables private datacentres in the cloud

Savvis lets customers specify where their virtual datacentre is hosted

IT outsourcing firm Savvis has officially released a service enabling enterprise customers to build a private virtual datacentre residing within the firm's cloud-based infrastructure.

Now called Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Datacentre (VPDC), the service was first disclosed last year under its development codename of Project Spirit, but was available only to customers on the test programme before today.

The platform enables customers to quickly build and securely deploy virtual infrastructure in the cloud, doing away with the need to physically procure, configure or manage any hardware, according to Savvis.

"The gist of this release is that we are now offering the ability to build enterprise-class infrastructure in the cloud on a pay-per-use basis," said Brian Klingbeil, managing director for Savvis in EMEA.

Administrators can simply go into the Savvis web portal to add resources, and can even drag-and-drop servers between firewalls, he added.

Key differentiators when compared to other cloud providers are the security, enterprise support and service-level agreements that Savvis can offer, Klingbeil claimed.

"SAN-quality storage is also available, whereas in mass-market clouds these kind of things are typically not available," he said.

Another unique selling point is the ability for customers to choose where their virtual datacentre is hosted. Savvis has 18 datacentres across Europe, North America and Asia, but a UK firm, for example, can specify that their infrastructure is hosted in Europe because of data protection concerns.

Symphony VPDC is also being offered in three service tiers with differing performance, reliability, scalability and support levels, starting with Essential and Balanced at launch. The top-level Premier tier will be available at a later date.

"You can work in a development environment at a low cost then, if the project comes to fruition, you can promote that application or service up to a higher level for production availability," said Klingbeil.

The customer's ability to choose location also depends on the service tier level, with Essential customers able to choose by global region, Balanced customers able to specify a country (or area of the country in the US), while top tier customers can select down to the metropolitan area.

On the infrastructure side, Symphony VPDC runs on Cisco's Unified Computing System server hardware with Nexus switches and Compellent storage, plus VMware for the virtualisation layer.

Savvis said that public pricing announcements for Symphony VPDC are "pending ", but claimed it has created a dramatically simplified pricing model compared to other available cloud services.

For example, basic services such as load balancing, IP addresses, firewalls and resource guarantees are included in the monthly VPDC fee. Rival operators typically charge for each of these as separate items, according to Savvis. Customers can also trial the service before signing up.

In a study published earlier this month, Savvis reported that IT infrastructure at UK enterprises is predicted to drop from 90 per cent on-premise today to just 23 per cent in 10 years' time.

Klingbeil explained that, in the short term, companies will be focused on migrating applications to be cloud-ready, and in the medium term on hybrid cloud solutions. Going all or mostly cloud-based will be a long-term shift.

"We pride ourselves at Savvis on having a prescriptive set of services that allows people to follow that path at the speed they choose," he said.