Savvis to trial private cloud service

Web hosting leader is building differentiated cloud services around Cisco gear

Savvis said Tuesday that it has signed up more than a dozen enterprise customers for a trial of its new private cloud service, which will be widely available by the middle of next year.

Dubbed Savvis Symphony, the offering will include varying grades of service depending on the application, along with multi-tiered security. In January, Savvis will begin testing its private cloud service from two of its 28 data centers worldwide.

The initial customers for Savvis Symphony range from software developers who are looking for a lower-cost, lower-grade of data center services for test and development of new applications, to consumer-oriented companies setting up marketing Web sites for products with intense but short-term demand.

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Savvis said Tuesday that it has signed up more than a dozen enterprise customers for a trial of its new private cloud service, which will be widely available by the middle of next year.

Dubbed Savvis Symphony, the offering will include varying grades of service depending on the application, along with multi-tiered security. In January, Savvis will begin testing its private cloud service from two of its 28 data centers worldwide.

The initial customers for Savvis Symphony range from software developers who are looking for a lower-cost, lower-grade of data center services for test and development of new applications, to consumer-oriented companies setting up marketing Web sites for products with intense but short-term demand.

"These customers…have batch jobs that they want to hand off, particularly during busy times, so they can continue to support their primary transactions on their core infrastructure," explains Savvis CTO Bryan Doerr.

Unlike today's outage-prone cloud computing services, Savvis Symphony will offer the same reliability and predictability that enterprise customers have come to expect from traditional Web hosting services, says the company.

"Our goal is to have the same reliability with Savvis Symphony that we offer in our dedicated managed services," Doerr says.

The issue of the reliability of cloud computing has been in the forefront this year, as Google has suffered several high-profile outages with its cloud-based services. The Pentagon, for example, says it is targeting 99.99% availability for its cloud computing service.

Doerr says early Savvis Symphony customers are interested in more than uptime when evaluating private cloud offerings.

"What will adversely affect a customer on a cloud is if they have variable transaction performance on their applications because the resources they are commanding are varying among other users," Doerr says. "If the systems underneath the cloud hood aren't enforcing the provisioning, than there's no guarantee that the applications will get the resources they need."

Savvis says its Symphony service will achieve accurate and stable provisioning of data center resources through the deployment of two Cisco products: Unified Computing System and Unified Service Delivery.

Unveiled in March, Cisco's Unified Computing System is a single management platform that allows data center operators to provision and manage compute, network and storage resources in a virtualized environment.

Cisco's Unified Service Delivery, which was announced in May, is a cloud computing platform for service providers including Cisco CRS-1 core routers and Nexus 7000 data center switches.

Savvis says that by using these Cisco products it will be able to provide accurate provisioning — not over-provisioning or under-provisioning — of all data center resources, which will translate into lower costs for customers.

"For customers who don't think of public clouds as predictable enough, we're offering another choice of how they can get cloud economics," Doerr says.