Network services company Virgin Media Business and Cloud services provider Savvis have launched a partnership that welds the former’s network infrastructure to the latter’s compute resource provision capabilities to create a new Virtual Private Datacentre (VPDC) that is very precisely targeted as a specific set of potential customers: businesses on the high end of `medium’ and the low end of `large’.
The target is, in fact a pragmatically sensible option for the pairing of enterprises with between 250 and 1,000 seats, though it has to be said, it took a bit of deducing from the press conference announcing it. In essence, what is happening is that Virgin wants to exploit its high performance, all fibre-optic UK communications network as the glue for cloud-based virtual private datacentres.
The company has already invested some £13bn in building it out around the country and it already forms the basis of its successful consumer entertainment services and the Big Red Internet service it offers. Connectivity is available in the 100M/bit range and more, particularly as the company feels most business users will need to user the network during the day, which is a slack time for consumer utilisation.
Some of the confusion at the press conference stemmed from a statement from Virgin that the virtual datacentre service would be available to users on an absolute pay-per-use basis. Set up a new service - using an interface which in demonstration at least was extremely clear and straight forward, is not only simple but also presents the user with the cost of the resources to be deployed – and the billing engine runs until the instruction is given to stop.
So a service requirement could in theory be defined, implemented, run and then torn down in the space of a morning, with only a morning’s worth of time to pay for. But this example is essentially the `development and test’ service model originally defined by Amazon for its EC2 service, where applications developers often require resources for a fixed period of time to evaluate and test work-in-progress.
Here, short-term resource rental in the Cloudmakes absolute economic sense. In practice, of course, the situation will be somewhat different for most business users, who will be looking to establish business systems and processes that run regularly if not continuously, and where a longer term contract-based relationship is the more likely option. This is also likely to be the long term target for the Virgin-Savvis partnership.
But the strict pay-per-use model is in fact a core part of the partnership’s initial marketing plan and its target of 250 to 1,000-seat enterprises. While it would appear to be an ideal platform for a wide range of businesses, from the smallest to the largest, that does not make a good starting point for marketing the new operation, as Virgin Media Business MD, Mark Heraghty, explained.
