From The Expert Feature Article
July 29, 2013

Savvis Floats Virtual Data Center in the Cloud


Savvis last week shipped its Savvis Cloud Data Center, a new service based on Cisco's (News - Alert) Unified Data Center and VMware vCloud Director 5.1 that supports hybrid clouds.

Savvis used to be an independent outfit focused largely on the cloud. That was two years ago, before the massive telecom company CenturyLink shelled out $2.5 billion to buy Savvis.

CenturyLink knows a good thing when it buys it and has kept the Savvis brand intact. In fact, Savvis has done nearly nothing except push deeper into cloud, including bundling services to make it easier for clients to fully exploit the Internet. This largely comes in form of savvisdirect, launched late last year.

The new Cloud Data Center continues that proud cloud tradition, and focuses on virtual private data centers, allowing clients to build software-defined data center services and have security, storage, compute and the network all easily managed. “Businesses are looking to migrate applications hosted on-premise into the cloud using a variety of hybrid solutions,” said Andrew Higginbotham, chief technology officer at Savvis. “Designed for customers who rely on VMware technologies, Savvis Cloud Data Center streamlines extensions into the cloud with easy-to-use familiar interfaces and tools for scaling performance to their needs.”

VMware, as you might expect, likes the new service. “Cloud Data Center, built on vCloud Director 5.1, can provide businesses with a simple and flexible platform for hybrid cloud delivery that enables control and choice on where to run applications and effective asset protection through true data center extensibility,” said Dave O'Callaghan, senior vice president of Global Channels and Alliances, VMware.

So does Cisco. “The integration of Cisco's Unified Data Center technologies, such as UCS and Unified Fabric, gives Savvis Cloud Data Center end-users the dynamic infrastructure foundation they need to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds in a secure and efficient manner,” said Giuliano Di Vitantonio, vice president, data center and cloud solutions marketing, Cisco.

One customer looked high and low before opting for the new Savvis service.

“We vetted many providers with great solutions in specific types of service offerings, but chose Savvis Cloud Data Center based upon its ability to provide top-tier services across many different service classes,” explained Roger Hale, vice president of cloud services and chief information security officer at Cloudswell. “Working with Savvis, we have employed a hybrid cloud solution that provides scalability, flexibility and budgetary control with the visibility and auditability to meet our customers' information security and compliance requirements.”

A Savvis Backgrounder

So what is Savvis all about these days? A lot apparently. “Savvis provides a robust range of managed services across our hosting products. We provide IT strategy, Data center migration and cloud migration consulting for small, lightweight and large enterprise engagements. Cloud Data Center is one of the options for an end state for these consulting engagements, should the answer be a Savvis hosted solution,” a spokesperson explained. “We also provide Operating Systems monitoring and management for our Cloud (including Cloud Data Center) and traditional hosted managed services. This goes beyond the reactive service of having "experts standing by 24x7." Our full OS management includes proactive monitoring based on standard or customer requested metrics.  This management layer extends to simple and complex storage, network and security services as well.”

The Managed Magic of Savvis

Gartner (News - Alert) is uniquely powerful in the world of IT. Large shops often essentially outsource high level decisions, relying instead on Gartner recommendations. And given that, vendors move heaven and earth to influence the analysts at Gartner.

And Savvis is clearly a major MSP player. So it is no real surprise that Savvis made it into Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting.

Vendors are placed in the so-called magic quadrant based innovation, product strategy, and execution ability. Savvis believes its being in this quadrant is a no-brainer. In the managed space, Savvis offers Infrastructure as a Service, managed applications, backup and storage, professional services and backup and storage.



Gartner Web Hosting Quadrant, North America




Edited by Rich Steeves


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