Savvis gets into 'Spirit' with virtual data centres

Savvis has previewed what it claims will be the first fully virtualised private data centre service that is designed to give enterprises an on-demand data centre resource, as and when they require it.

Savvis' virtual private data centre service has been dubbed "Spirit" and is set to enter beta release in the fourth quarter of this year, and go live sometime in Q1 or Q2 2010.

Spirit will give companies the ability to purchase on demand data centre services, such as storage, computing resources, networking infrastructure, via a web interface.

"Savvis approach is purchasable service packages, kind of like infrastructure building blocks," said David Shacochis, VP of Research and Development at Savvis. "We build enterprise IT infrastrucure and customers pay monthly for our services, so there is no large CAPEX outlays."

"Spirit is a cloud data centre and there is no other offering in the market place like it," he told Techworld. He said that Savvis has 28 data centres globally that are connected via a tier one backbone, and these data centres will be able to supply multiple quality of service levels depending on customer requirements.

Spirit has been built using switches from Cisco (Nexus 5000 and 7000) as well as VMware vSphere. Shacochis feels that the use of such leading edge technology makes it unique at the moment.

"We are building a complete virtualised cloud data centre, that bills monthly, and offers a range of services in a physical data centre on a cloud basis," he said. "Services include routing switching, storage and security services."

"Customers come to our portal and design the architecture they need," he said. "No one has a completely virtualised environment that is ideally suited for them at the moment. With Spirit there is no compromises, as it is exactly tailored for their own environment."

"There are two differentiated features in this cloud data centre offering," he said. "First is the quality of service and second is that customers can configure their own virtual private data centers and pay for them by the hour."

Shacochis said that this service will be ideally matched to those companies transitioning from a traditional software model to SaaS model. "Our infrastructure is an ideal match for them, as they are not interested in running data centres, but are just interested in running software."

He also said that interactive marketing and web branding (web solutions) verticals would be interested in Spirit "It is a high stakes game these companies embark on to run web promotions," he said.

"You can have 'flash' crowds, where there are tremendous traffic spikes. For example in the US if a website or technology is mentioned in the Oprah Winfrey show, there are tremendous flash crowds. It can damage a brand, the brand can take a hit, if it cannot cope with demand and the user has a bad experience."

According to Shacochis, Savvis is still building a pricing model. "We will publish the rates, but we are begin the process of telling the market about the process first," he said.

An online demo of Spirit is available here.

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