Verizon Business has launched an on-demand datacentre service, offering access to virtual and physical servers on a pay-per-use model.

Pricing will be based on daily usage, and the company will offer discounts for monthly volume commitments starting at $2,500 (£1,500) a month.

"People need to generate new efficiencies in power utilisation, and scale resources as appropriate," said Mark Beaumont, Verizon Business product management group manager. "We are also offering customers transparency into their information so they can see what is utilised and where in the organisation it is used."

Verizon describes its new offering as 'computing-as-a-service', in that the architecture will allow customers to provision physical and virtual server environments to best accommodate the type of application being deployed.

For example, a business may want to use a virtual environment for staging and development, but may choose a physical server infrastructure for business-critical applications, such as database servers, which lets them customise servers and select the server configuration, Verizon said.

Customers will also have access to a self-service portal through the Verizon Enterprise Center to manage their servers, and will be able to add a number of security services, such as identity and access management, host intrusion detection and application vulnerability assessment.

"With Verizon Computing-as-a-Service we are ushering in a new era of computing that offers security, resiliency and scalability on demand, with a whole new level of flexibility and a low-cost structure," said Nancy Gofus, Verizon global product development president.

The service is available to US customers immediately, and will be offered in Europe and Asia from August.