A diagram of how Hosted Solutions' Stratus Trusted Cloud solution works.
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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In what appears to be a growing trend among companies in the IT industry, Web hosting provider Hosted Solutions (www.hostedsolutions.com) announced this week that it has introduced a hybrid option for its Stratus Trusted Cloud solution.
The new hybrid option now gives companies more options regarding how and where to host their IT infrastructures. Since launching its enterprise-class cloud solution in June, Hosted Solutions has seen "strong traction" from customers, providing them with secure, enterprise-class cloud environment with built-in high availability and automated resource balancing.
During this time, the company has received a great deal of feedback from customers, requesting Hosted Solutions to introduce a choice between both the multi-tenant, enterprise cloud and a private/dedicated cloud solutions.
As Christopher "Kip" Turco, chief operating officer at Hosted Solutions explains, this made the choice to introduce a hybrid option the next logical step for the company.
"We went through an in-depth survey with customers once they're on it to get their feedback, and what we were quickly driven to is this concept of a hybrid cloud," says Turco. "It was probably 30 to 40 days where we started getting more and more requests from our customers, as they started moving more things into the cloud, was to provide them with the flexibility and not move everything if needed but rather cross-connect and do a hybrid between a dedicated or colo model and a cloud model so they can utilize the cloud for what was most beneficial for them."
The Stratus hybrid cloud option blends and maximizes the best of the multi-tenant cloud and dedicated environments, so that customers are able to cross-connect their existing back-end resources, such as databases and other supporting applications to the Stratus Trusted Cloud.
This option gives customers more flexibility and lets them use the Stratus Trusted Cloud for Web front-end computing power and other resources, such as network, firewall, load balancing and Web servers.
Additionally, customers can cross connect Stratus cloud computing resources directly into their environment to accomodate overflow traffic such as seasonal spikes, which require more compute capacity.
"The hybrid makes a lot of sense, and the key from an e-commerce perspective is the flexibility and time to market," says Jeff Kramer, vice president of technology at Hosted Solutions. "People are looking for ways to supplement their existing production environment for peaks and spikes -- holiday traffic is a good one for e-commerce companies. That has resonated with a lot of customers I have talked to, the hybrid option gives them the ability to set that up in advance."
Stratus Trusted Cloud's hybrid version lets companies benefit from rapid and elastic deployment and usage, letting them add or subtract resources as needed within minutes compared to the weeks they usually needed to deploy the same type of infrastructure. This, of course, cuts down on physical and staffing assets, helping companies with their bottom line.
Many companies are still reluctant about switching over to cloud technology. In a recent independent study commissioned on behalf of PEER 1, 88 percent of IT decision makers said they do not use cloud technologies, while 39 percent said that their lack of knowledge has been preventing them from adopting cloud computing.
Turco believes the hybrid option will convince many of these same companies that are otherwise hesitant of the cloud.
"I think this hybrid model has been helping with the overall adoption rate as it allows people to test it out and use it where it makes sense, but not jump in with both feet. A lot of companies are still a little wary of what the cloud is about and what it is, and still waiting for the whole model to mature, whether it is here or at a Mosso [company]."
Customers have already shown a positive response, with 80 percent of the company's nearly 1,000 customers using a hybrid version in "one facet or another," says Turco. Organizations such as Brandport, Belk, Rollover Systems, VMware, Knowledge Point 360, Cleveland Cavaliers, Envirosis, Baylor School and NRCCUA have all switched over to the hybrid solution.
"We're providing the industry with the widest range of infrastructure offerings," he says. "We're not trying to fit anyone into a bucket and have them work out of that. Rather, we're providing them options to best run their applications and have us support it."
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