OpSource competes with Amazon on virtual private cloud

New feature mixes public and private.

By Chris Kanaracus
Published: 19:42 GMT, 28 August 09

OpSource has announced a new cloud computing infrastructure service that will offer users a dedicated "virtual private cloud" of resources, and can determine how much access it has to the public Internet, according to OpSource. The VPC can be connected with users' on-premise data centers via a VPN connection.

"You get a truly private ethernet network ... only you have access to it. It doesn't touch the public Internet. Nobody else can see it but the customer," said CEO Treb Ryan.

OpSource isn't the first cloud infrastructure vendor to pursue this concept. Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services rolled out a similar feature, which is now in limited beta.

But OpSource has added a few other twists to its offering, such as the ability to set up role-based budgeting and user permissions, and both master and department-level management.

Without these finer-grained controls, IT managers could lose track of their cloud-service costs, Ryan said. "Someone could go and buy a bunch of extra capacity and then I end up with a $70,000 bill and I have no idea who did it," he said.

In addition, OpSource is touting a 100 percent SLA (service level agreement) for the service, although Ryan acknowledged that such a promise can't really be guaranteed. "What that says is we start incurring financial penalties [in the event of downtime]," he said.

Users also get 24-7 phone support and trouble ticket tracking, along with community support, and the service is compliant with SAS 70 auditing standards. Access is provided through a Web interface and a set of APIs (application programming interfaces).

Pricing isn't finalised but will be overall "consistent with Amazon," Ryan said.

While OpSource is comparatively small to AWS, it is partnering with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone on the network and infrastructure side, giving great potential for scale, Ryan said.

Now in private beta, OpSource cloud will enter public beta Oct. 2 and become generally available several months after that, Ryan said.

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Kevin Dobbs | Published: 19:35 GMT, 01 September 2009

Checkout Montclair Advisors interview of OpSource CEO Treb Ryan at http://montclairadvisors.com/blog/2009/09/saas-business-profile-opsource/

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