Power and cooling costs are top of mind for many IT managers, but implementing energy-saving strategies isn’t always easy. To address this challenge, FusionStorm has developed a unique managed hosting service that delivers green computing on demand. FusionStorm’s IT Xpress managed hosting service leverages energy-efficient technologies in a shared environment to cut electricity costs for customers.

“We built out our Sacramento and Las Vegas data centers with blade servers and energy-efficient processors,” said FusionStorm CTO Vince Conroy. “These solutions deliver 15 percent to 20 percent power savings compared to traditional 2U boxes, for example.

“In addition, we are using virtualization to create an offering that is completely flexible and scalable. Those features, along with the economies of scale gained from the shared environment, result in a net reduction in energy demands.”

The VMware environment enables FusionStorm engineers to deploy infrastructure within a few days or a couple of weeks, depending upon the size of the environment — at no capital expense to the customer. The solution can also scale up or down on demand, and is very flexible in terms of architecture.

“Our environment can support virtually any application that runs on a Windows, Unix or Linux platform, and can do it very cost-effectively,” said Conroy. “A fairly large financial institution is using IT Xpress to host a line-of-business application, and this solution has saved them more than 50 percent compared to self hosting.”

IT Xpress includes enterprise-class Fibre Channel and SATA storage that is also energy efficient. Customers can choose shared or dedicated storage solutions — either way, storage can be grown on demand and is highly flexible in terms of deployment.

Customers may also opt for FusionStorm’s turnkey, full-service managed security offering, which includes 24x7 monitoring, intrusion and threat alerting, and incident response.

“IT Xpress is a great alternative for customers that are looking at securing data center space, buying hardware, deploying a network, probably hiring staff, and figuring out how to handle 24x7 support and incident response,” said Conroy. “It is also ideal for customers that don’t have in-house expertise in a particular area — they can tap the full depth and breadth of FusionStorm’s engineering talent. A lot of companies are turning to this option because it saves energy, money, time and headaches.”