Virtustream IaaS Highlights
- A private company with strong financial backing
- Specialises in IaaS and Cloud Computing
- Is a managed services company, understanding the issues of compliance and data jurisdiction
- Provides consumption-based pricing for its services
- Allows for on- and off-premise, dedicated and multi-tenanted resources
- Is very early in offering large scale SAP deployments via the Cloud
- Is the first of the Cloud Managed Services suppliers
- Will enjoy a resurgence in the UK Outsourcing market
Introduction
Virtustream is a private managed services supplier. They employed ITCandor to deliver a keynote presentation at the recent Jersey Telecom conference, so we must declare an interest – although, as always with posts on this site, they have not commissioned this write-up. This article is based on discussions with the company’s CTO Julian Box and other senior executives.
Virtustream Has Significant Financial Backing
The company has strong financial backing from Columbia Capital, Blue Lagoon Capital, Intel Capital, Noro-Moseley and TDFunds. It has data centre and collocation facilities in San Francisco, Vienna (Virginia), London and Jersey – three of which it owns itself.
It is a long-term VMWare partner and puts virtualisation at the heart of everything it does, as its name suggests; it also claims strong ties to Vizioncore (now part of Sequent), Citrix, Datacore, Compellent (just acquired by Dell), Provision, EMC, Microsoft, Riverbed, IBM and Veeam.
Its reference customers include VMWare and EMC themselves, Honda, Standard Chartered, The Jersey Financial Services Commission, AIB, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Somerset County Council.
Its offerings include Professional, Cloud and Managed Services, although this article will focus mainly on its newly introduced xStream Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. The Cloud does not define Virtustream’s services, rather it is just part of one delivery mechanism for a broad set of managed services which include private on-premise activities for the hyper-security conscious.
xStream – The ‘Infrastructure As A Service’ Offering
Virtustream claims a number of major advantages as an IaaS supplier. In particular it:
- Is capable of provisioning compute resources based on aggregate workloads, making them truly consumption based
- Guarantees I/O throughput, making its service suitable for mission critical workloads
- Can and does support major SAP implementations – its deal with Domino Sugar in October is a multi-thousand seat service encompassing production, quality assurance, development and test landscapes
- Offers a single point of management between hosted and on-premise Cloud infrastructure under a single performance SLA
- Is architected to be hypervisor-independent, embracing KVM, HyperV, ESX and/or Xen solutions
- Is ‘oldest and most tenured certified VMWare consulting partner’
While it is difficult to test all of these assertions, it’s clear that the company has been working successfully in an area many other companies have only just discovered. Even Fujitsu for instance admitted last year to be late in offering IaaS solutions; for comparison Virtustream’s business goes back 9 years.
xStream Encompasses On- And Of-Premise, Collocation And Multi-Tenanted Solutions
Many IaaS suppliers have a Web-only touch – for instance Double-Take Software’s first Cloud Computing offerings, announced in January, required paying its license fees alongside payments to Amazon EC2 (and that only in $US). As a managed service supplier Virtustream gets much more deeply involved. Customers can choose to run xStream services on- or off-premise: in the latter case they can retain their own dedicated resources or choose to share multi-tenanted equipment. The choice of deployment often depends on balancing issues of security, elasticity, performance and cost, with the greatest TCO savings being in multi-tenanted and greatest security in on-premise solutions. Virtustream claims to put potential customers through due diligence processes to make its multi-tenanted environment most trustworthy.
ITCandor believes that benefits of sharing resources have usually taken a back-seat to security in the UK, where IT management is a particularly conservative profession: it will be interesting to see how this behaviour loosens up as new generations take over as CIOs.
Virtustream Offers ERP Via Cloud Services
In general Cloud Computing is been adopted as a ‘bottom-up’ process, with consumers active in applications such as social networking, Web-based email. In the business market companies tend to look for non ‘mission critical’ applications as the first candidates to move to the Cloud – IT versions of the car park and canteen. Virtustream’s ERP capabilities – including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft applications – are therefore impressive, as these are very much core applications for most.
Virtustream’s Partnership With Jersey Telecom
In Jersey ‘xStream’ has been rebadged as ‘OneSource’ and is being run from Jersey Telecom’s data centres. The partnership makes sense given the small size and limited technical resources available on the island. Jersey is home to a number of financial services companies which pay less corporation tax than they would if located on the UK mainland, although Virtustream’s customers are by no means only in this class. Jersey Telecom employs around 350 people and offers a number of services including MPLS, LAN/WAN, private circuits, Internet services, fixed line and mobile as well as technical and business continuity services. A picture of its network connections into the UK, Guernsey and France are shown in Figure 1.
UK Managed Services Will Grow Through Cloud Computing
In 2010 we believe that the UK Outsourcing and Managed Services market was worth around £25 billion (see Figure 2). As mentioned a few times in previous posts, it did not (or should we say ‘has not yet become’) a countervailing business in the recession; in fact spending will decline 12% in the year. However Outsourcing looks like to go through resurgence in the next few years as businesses look to cut costs through centralisation. Cloud Computing is bound to play a role, especially if its suppliers can demonstrate a good understanding of the security, compliance, data protection and jurisdiction issues well known by the traditional vendors. Perhaps it’s time for managed services companies to stop seeing the Cloud as the enemy and embrace it as a new and dynamic delivery mechanism.
Some Conclusions – Virtustream Is The First Cloud Managed Services Supplier
In our analysis of Cloud Computing in the UK we have often focused on the threat that new entrants pose to traditional outsourcing and managed services suppliers. Virtustream shows the future – offering to host even mission critical applications for its customers and advertising significant savings in TCO. It supports on- and off-premise solutions and understands the balance organisations need to make between security, compliance and cost.
The greatest savings are for those companies who choose to host their applications on its public multi-tenanted environment. It offers an acceptable alternative to Amazon and Google that overcomes the security issues which represent a gating issue for many. The partnership with Jersey Telecom is important in demonstrating a close partnership in a small community. On an island with only 95k inhabitants it is difficult to justify building your own data centre, and yet the offshore tax advantages for the financial companies operating there are often dependent on ensuring the local processing and storage of customer information. Cloud Computing is therefore a natural solution for Jersey’s business community. Virtustream’s offerings don’t just represent a natural choice for these islanders, they also point towards a different, more connected, future for UK managed services, which will grow through Cloud implementations. Other UK suppliers and customers can learn a lot from its approach.
Do you use IaaS from Virtustream or other managed service providers? We’d like to hear about your experiences. Please do so by commenting on this post.
ITCandor Acronym Buster
ERP – Enterprise Reource Planning
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
KVM – Kernel-based Virtual Machine (in this case not Keyboard Video Monitor)
MPLS – Multi Protocol Label Switching
TCO – Total Cost of Ownershp