September 19, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Data center and managed services provider CBTS (cincinnatibell.com/cbts), a division of Ohio-based telecommunications provider Cincinnati Bell, announced on Tuesday that it has launched a new utility computing service to help customers provision and manage virtual Windows and Linux servers in a cloud computing environment.
Launched in partnership with Virtual Blocks (virtualblocks.com), the new offering titled "Virtual Data Center" enables users to provision virtual servers through a standard web portal, specifying CPU, disk, memory and operating system requirements.
CBTS says Virtual Block has developed a business "wrapper" around VMware Virtual Center that enables a standard virtualization environment to function without the usual IT operator intervention and management.
Servers are available for use within minutes, allocated from within a large resource pool consisting of Sun AMD Servers, Nortel and Cisco Network Switches and NetApp SAN Disk, that are securely housed in one of the CBTS Tier 3 data centers, says the company in its latest announcement.
"More and more customers are requesting cloud computing and software as a service capabilities," says John Burns, president of CBTS. "As a trusted technology adviser to our customers, CBTS is dedicated to bringing new and innovative solutions to market. The Virtual Data Center unifies our resource pool of secure data centers, scalable computing and networking equipment, and advanced solution development to provide cost savings and competitive advantage to CBTS clients."
Virtual Blocks is a subsidiary of Toronto, Canada-based software developer Commerx Computer Systems, which is "dedicated to building solutions for the virtualization market." Its products include the Virtual Server Grid for service providers and large IT organizations and the Virtual In-a-Box Environment for SMB customers.
The Virtual Data Center has been in development since June and will be in full-production by November 1. Development plans include service enhancements enabling quicker access to emerging virtual appliances, end-user initiated disaster recovery setup and testing and dedicated virtual hosting options, says the company.
According to many of the discussions brought up Tier 1 Research's fourth annual Hosting Transformation Summit this past week, virtualization and cloud computing are considered as "the future of hosting" and some of the "hottest hosting services" companies should be looking into developing in order to remain successful and competitive in the industry, include "cloud-based" services like platform-as-a-service and utility storage.
The WHIR reported on two cloud offering launches this week including Hosting.com's CloudNine solution, which was unveiled at VMworld 2008 and Citrix Systems' enterprise grade cloud computing solution, Citrix Cloud Center.
