Savvis Plays Conductor For Cloud 'Symphony'
First up is the Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC), a new public cloud offering that has been in beta since November 2009. Ken Owens, Savvis technical vice president, security and virtualization, said VPDC lets an enterprise build and deploy an entire virtual data center on Savvis' cloud infrastructure in one fell swoop.
Owens said the VPDC answers the question "How would you deploy an entire data center in the cloud … all at one time and with complete control?"
Savvis Symphony VPDC lets enterprises build and securely deploy a full set of data center services for applications in the cloud, eliminating the need to buy, install, configure or manage hardware. Owens estimates that a VPDC can be configured and deployed in roughly an hour.
"For a full deployment it takes 30 minutes to an hour regardless of the number of virtual machines," he said.
Users can add and remove resources and drag and drop servers between firewalls from Savvis' Web portal. Additionally, Savvis Symphony VPDC lets users pick where their virtual data center is hosted on 18 of Savvis' data centers and on its global network across North America, Europe and Asia.
The VPDC service also features two service tiers, Essential and Balanced, along with a third, Premier, scheduled for later release. Features, support and performance vary by profile. Essential customers can choose data location by region, while Balanced users can specify a country or an area in the U.S.
Owens said that VPDC runs on Cisco's Unified Computing System (USC) hardware with Nexus switches and Compellent storage. For virtualization, Savvis uses VMware.
Owens said Savvis Symphony VPDC is highly secure and compliant, which, coupled with reliability and performance, are the key differentiators for Savvis as it goes against AT&T and Verizon in the cloud computing space. Owens said Symphony will also rival other cloud providers like Amazon, Rackspace and Terremark to some degree.
"We know what enterprises need and are looking for in a cloud offering," Owens said. "We have a security services team. We have a storage team. We have a networking services team. And we have our own network -- a tier-one backbone."
Along with Savvis Symphony VPDC, the St. Louis-based provider also launched a pair of hybrid offerings that leverage both cloud and traditional infrastructure services such as collocation and managed services. The services let companies put some applications in the cloud as they want to, while retaining their on-premise infrastructure, allowing them to make the leap at their own pace. Symphony Dedicated is a private cloud, while Symphony Open is public cloud service that is similar to the Dedicated offering but is multi-tenant, Owens said.