While public clouds get much of the attention, private clouds are the focus of most of the enterprise action. And a growing number of providers are rolling out services that bring a turn-key cloud to the customer premises.
The latest entry is CSC, which today announced its CSC BizCloud, which can deliver an on-premises version of its CloudCompute service in a customer data center within 10 weeks. The company says the offering combines the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the convenience and commercial model of a public cloud.
The option of leasing a turn-key "private cloud as a service" model will be attractive to enterprise users that operate their own facilities and have resisted storing their IT equipment in third-party data centers. Several providers have announced offerings that place a modular data center at a customer site and manage the container for the customer. These include i/o Data Centers with its i/o Anywhere product and Microsoft, which is expected to release the Windows Azure Appliance in a modular structure.
Three Packages, SLA Tiers Available
CSC's offering adapts its CloudCompute service and equipment to be installed in a customer data center. CloudCompute customers can mix and match three packages - Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus - and four tiers of service with guaranteed availability levels from 99 to 99.95 percent. CSC cloud models are billed as a service from a standard rate card, the company said.
"BizCloud and CloudCompute provide the centerpiece of the modern virtualized datacenter," said Siki Giunta, vice president of Cloud Computing and Software Services, CSC. "There is a model for every organization — whether you want self-managed or a managed service option, or you want private, public or a hybrid cloud, CSC is following through on our promise of delivering the right cloud, the right way. With CSC, every organization can easily make the initial move to ‘as a service’ — infrastructure, platform ad software on-demand."
Built Atop Cisco-EMC-VVMware
The CloudCompute infrastructure is built on the Vblock Infrastructure Platform from VCE, a joint venture between Cisco, EMC and VMware. BizCloud shares the same infrastructure as the CSC public and off-premise private cloud models, which gives organizations the option of moving workloads to CSC's public cloud based on the security and control those workloads require.
"For enterprises, it has been difficult to obtain the economic benefits of a public cloud which is delivered to them as a private cloud," said Robert Mahowald, vice president, SaaS & Cloud Services at IDC. "CSC has been very strategic with this announcement. They engaged customers in a discussion about their business needs and developed a flexible solution that addresses those needs spot on. BizCloud and CSC's related services break new ground for IT buyers trying to navigate the road to data center transformation."
