Imagine if every organization had to generate the electricity it needed to operate. Such a system would be difficult to build and manage, costly and wasteful. And yet organizations of all sizes maintain the IT infrastructure needed to generate the computing power necessary for day-to-day operations, creating considerable overhead and unused capacity.
It often makes more sense to “plug in” to computing power — just as you connect to the electric grid. A concept known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) enables organizations to use processing, storage, networking, security and other fundamental computing resources without purchasing and maintaining the underlying hardware. The IaaS provider supplies the infrastructure and the services necessary to support it, while the customer maintains control over operating systems, applications and data.
Now customers can take advantage of this model through FusionStorm’s IT Xpress Cloud IaaS offering based on VMware vCloud technology. The new offering extends FusionStorm’s existing IT Xpress hosted solutions and is a key component of the company’s “Cloud Anywhere” initiative, which uniquely delivers private cloud solutions to customers how and where they need it — in their own data centers, or hosted in a FusionStorm data center and delivered completely as a service.
In that sense, IT Xpress Cloud functions much like a utility. Customers simply pay for IT services based upon how much they use, the same way they pay for electricity, gas and water. As a result, FusionStorm is helping to refocus IT spending on business innovation.
Shifting the Burden
Many organizations are burdened with an overabundance of assets and large amounts of depreciation, making the business less responsive. With technology refresh cycles shrinking to three years or less, organizations need a more flexible acquisition model that diminishes the need for large capital expenditures.
IaaS reduces hardware acquisition and deployment costs by shifting the capital expense and maintenance of IT assets to the IaaS provider. This allows organizations to efficiently scale up IT resources to respond to peak demands without the need to carry excess overhead during more quiet periods. IaaS also provides greater flexibility, giving organizations access to the precise mix of hardware, applications, bandwidth and skill sets they need without the burden of supporting legacy systems.
IaaS also enables customers to leverage the efficiency and economies of scale of the IaaS provider to build and deploy IT services faster and cheaper than ever before. It also fosters business innovation by enabling organizations to introduce IT services that might be cost prohibitive if hardware and software purchases and additional IT skill sets were required.
IT Xpress Cloud combines the reliability, performance and scalability of FusionStorm’s enterprise-class data center infrastructure with the flexibility and economics of cloud computing. It incorporates solutions from VMware, Cisco, EMC and other industry leaders, along with FusionStorm’s feature-rich, 24x7 managed services.
With the ability to provide convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of resources that can be rapidly provisioned, IT Xpress Cloud presents extraordinary possibilities for IT transformation. It allows the creation of operational, cost and energy efficiency without the need to invest in additional technology, people and expertise, shifting the focus from infrastructure implementations onto the services and capabilities that can be achieved.
“IT Xpress Cloud represents a huge leap forward for our customers as it gives them an enterprise-ready on-ramp to private cloud computing, one that is easy to purchase, fast to deploy and grow, and reduces business risk,” said FusionStorm CEO and Founder John Varel. “It also complements our customer-premises data center solutions, giving us the unique ability to deliver private cloud to customers how and where they need it.”
Transforming IT
Frequently based on decades-old technology, many of today’s IT infrastructures have become too complex, too costly and too difficult to manage. Gartner reports that more than 70 percent of Global 1,000 organizations expect that they will need to significantly modify their data center facilities by 2012. Environmental issues have become increasingly worrisome. Even if power weren’t an issue, it is becoming almost impossible to cool the data center space. IaaS addresses these pain points by reducing data center real estate requirements, driving down power and cooling costs in the process. In essence, organizations transfer power, cooling and space burdens to the cloud service provider, who can drive down costs through economies of scale.
With IT Xpress Cloud, FusionStorm provides a secure “Virtual Data Center” (vDC) for each customer organization. Customers can choose to provision their own servers within the vDC using pre-built or customized templates, or FusionStorm can provision and manage all of the servers and other components within the vDC on behalf of the customer. The company also offers a variety of optional, value-added IT Xpress Services to complement the core offering, including OS management, managed firewall and VPN services, patching, database administration, data backup, threat management, server load balancing and more. Both reservation-based and usage-based pricing is available.
Unlike many competitive solutions, IT Xpress Cloud allows dedicated physical servers and virtual machine servers to be mixed in the same hosted environment. This allows applications to be hosted where some component still requires a non-virtualized platform. The company also has future plans to offer enterprise hybrid cloud solutions, where customers can choose between running application workloads in their on-premises cloud or in the FusionStorm IT Xpress Cloud.
IT organizations today are under immense pressure to cut costs while also increasing efficiency. While economic conditions demand increased scrutiny and financial analysis for all IT decisions, business growth demands the ability to introduce new business models and services quickly. Faced with this apparent paradox, more and more organizations are looking to IaaS to satisfy both of those requirements.
IT Xpress Cloud eliminates the time and expense required to procure data center hardware along with the constant struggle to hire and retain qualified IT personnel to support the infrastructure. Like plugging into the electric grid, IT Xpress Cloud makes it simple and efficient to access the precise IT resources needed.