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Virtual Private Data Center Signals Arrival of Enterprise-Class Cloud

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July 23, 2010

Virtual Private Data Center Signals Arrival of Enterprise-Class Cloud

By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor


Just as Charles Lindbergh broke new ground in commercial aviation with historical flight from Roosevelt Field in Garden City located on New York’s Long Island to Le Bourget field in Paris in 1927, cloud computing has the potential to transform the way IT services are purchased, deployed and delivered to businesses and consumers globally. With that vision to change, Savvis Inc. has launched a new form of cloud computing that is characterized as 100 percent enterprise-class cloud.


Called Savvis Symphony, formerly dubbed Project Spirit in the Spirit of St. Louis, it allows for the first time clients to configure virtual private data center (VPDC) in the cloud with multi-tiered Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. In reality, it allows customers to select a service level that best fits their application requirements, and to have the cloud automatically provision and configure the infrastructure for those requirements. Unprecedented, it offers enterprise-grade availability, total redundancy, security options, and high-performance ILM storage.

Hence, with this virtualized data center, there is no need to physically procure, install, configure or manage any hardware. Plus, most of the functions you'd expect to have in a data center are under your control.

“An enterprise-class virtual private data center can be configured and deployed in about an hour from anywhere in the world, whereas it often takes up to 90 days to provision physical servers and build out the operating systems using typical IT processes,” said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis.

Savvis Symphony VPDC is designed and built on a massively scalable, best-of-breed infrastructure, with virtualization technology from VMware, an industry leader. While  the data center switches deployed are the Nexus 5000 and 7000 from Cisco (News - Alert), including the Nexus 1000v virtual switch on VMware vSphere installations. The company describes it as one of the early instantiations of a converged storage and data network. Multiple access methods to the virtual data center include MPLS VPN, Carrier Ethernet and Internet access.

Security functions like firewall and switch/router ACL's, IDS/IDP functions and file integrity monitoring are built into the platform and made available to the end-users.

Unlike many cloud service providers such as Amazon AWS, Savvis will work with customers who require security audits of the service that are required by programs like PCI (News - Alert). The audits could be on-site or virtual depending on what is needed, said Savvis.

VPDC puts traffic management functions like policy based load balancing and routing under the customer's control, managed through Savvis' Station Portal. For example, companies can select from three profiles and shape traffic in and out of the virtual data center and between nodes. Shaping traffic within the virtual private data center ensures that you can prioritize critical aspects of application performance such as latency priority and ensuring bandwidth is available.The company promises simplified data center deployments by abstracting the management of the infrastructure through their portal. Performance elements such as server, storage, and network utilization will be reported to the station portal where administrators can determine which components need to be scaled up or down. For example, increased latency could be due to storage bottlenecks, high CPU utilization or network congestion. Adjusting the wrong element won't have much impact on performance. If the problem is network congestion, a simple change in QoS prioritization may be enough to address the problem without having to add more bandwidth.

Managing the billing could be more complex than actually building a virtual data center. Savvis representatives indicated that the service will use different pricing models.

According to Savvis, the Symphony suite of services currently is available in 18 data centers with global access via Savvis’ network across North America, Europe and Asia.


Ashok Bindra is a veteran writer and editor with more than 25 years of editorial experience covering RF/wireless technologies, semiconductors and power electronics. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Erin Monda







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