(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Though the platform is not set for official release until next year, Internet infrastructure services provider Savvis (www.savvis.net) previewed its highly anticipated new cloud infrastructure platform last week in San Francisco at the sixth annual VMworld conference.
Entitled Project Spirit, the cloud platform is said to be the industry's first complete virtualized private data center aimed at enterprises customers, giving them access to a range of features and capabilities that they have not previously been offered.
The platform will let businesses purchase a range of data center services, including compute power, storage, security and networking, on an on demand basis or as a service through a web interface.
Savvis gave a preview of the service at the conference, which it currently offers in a video presentation posted on its website, which showcases Spirit's wizard-based provisioning and drag-and-drop resource topology design.
But perhaps the greatest selling point of Project Spirit is its ability to configure the quality of service, offering three tiers of service that range in capabilities.
"Customers are going to be able to configure their environments across multiple quality of service," says David Shacochis, vice president of research and development at Savvis. "We're introducing the term 'quality of service' which is traditionally used by us and other companies in the applied area and networking context and we're extending that into the data center and the data center switching fabric."
The VPDC platform is built around partnerships with Cisco and VMware, using Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches and VMware vSphere software to deliver these services over a converged fabric data center network and service provider-enabling virtualization platform.
Enterprise customers, in particular, will benefit from the VPDC platform, which will be more affordable than alternative methods of hosting microsites. It will offer a common platform to deploy new microsites in a fast and efficient way.
"We've built a platform that more closely simulates the traditional data center experience and has the ability to, down the road, be more software programmed as opposed to interacting with it in a provisioning interface manner," says Shacochis.
The company will offer the beta version of Project Spirit later this year, and has has already signed some participating partners.
With the launch just around the corner, Shacochis says the VPDC platform is well-positioned for success in a competitive cloud market.
"The real differentiation from our competition is the fact that we're building an environment that integrates the resources that you find in a data center together and offers them as part of an integrated platform," says Shacochis.
[Savvis' VPDC] is going to be the first that pitch everything together: from the core data center network, to the wide area network, and Internet access/bandwidth, to competing resources and software deployment."
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