Savvis bursts into cloud computing

Savvis (NASDAQ: SVVS) on Thursday announced cloud computing services aimed at companies with bursty Web traffic that are looking for a cost-effective way to handle peaks without over-provisioning their networks or data centers. 

Savvis Cloud Compute allows companies to take advantage of private or shared cloud computing environments.

Other IT vendors that made cloud computing announcements this week include IBM and Juniper. 

Savvis officials said their cloud offering has two key features:

--A Web portal that allows customers to provision their own virtual computing and storage capabilities on either private or shared resources. (In the past, Savvis did the provisioning.)

--New shared virtual platforms allow businesses to quickly ramp up servers or storage capacity to deal with unexpected or seasonal peaks at a lower cost than dedicated resources.

Savvis is targeting its cloud offerings at several vertical markets, including e-commerce vendors handling seasonal purchases, online marketing efforts tied to product launches, software developers testing new applications, and software-as-a-service vendors ramping up their customer bases.

``The model here is designed for any enterprise that frequently finds itself buying more capacity than it needs,’’ says Bryan Doerr, Savvis CTO. ``These companies buy dedicated private capacity in fairly large quantities, but they can benefit from incremental virtual machines…The benefit for them is the self management and the speed with which the provisioning takes place. They can use the [shared services] for capacity expansion or overflow data centers.’’

Doerr added that the challenge for data center operators is ``to run their infrastructure with exactly the right amount of capacity. Too much, and you’re overspending. Too little, and your customers are complaining.’’

Doerr said Savvis Cloud Compute offers data center operators the ability to respond to traffic bursts in an inexpensive way without having to buy or maintain dedicated servers or storage devices.

Enterprises also can use Savvis Cloud Compute to offload applications that are lower priority while retaining mission-critical applications on the data centers that they own and operate.

``We will be developing cloud platforms that have multiple grades of service in combination with other forms of Web hosting and co-location,’’ Doerr says. ``A typical enterprise has 200 applications that have a wide variety of operating characteristics. With the addition of cloud computing, enterprises can run these applications more efficiently with a significant reduction in cost.’’

Savvis officials said this was the first in a series of announcements related to cloud computing – one of the hottest technologies in 2009 -- planned for 2009.

Savvis’ dedicated cloud computing services will be available in all of its data centers, while the shared services will be available in Chicago, London, Santa Clara, Calif. and Piscataway, New Jersey.