Virtus Data Centres launches CoLo-on-Demand for the Cloud

Announcing CoLo-on-Demand, Virtus CEO Neil Cresswell said, “The promise of Cloud services is that customers can turn-up or turn-down the amount of computing power they buy at very short notice; so that their costs track their needs very closely. Until now however, Cloud providers have had heavy fixed data centre costs – often on a three, five or even 10 year contract that typically only goes up and never down.

“The data centre, or networks of connected data centres, are at the heart of the digital, mobile, social data and cloud computing revolutions. Data centres need to keep pace and align with business and IT strategies to be less of a cost and more of a catalyst to empower business. With our Cloud background Virtus understands the Cloud world and is adapting to changing business and IT models to help start up and established Cloud providers flourish easily; as an enabler to growth -not a cost- and to deliver for existing and future needs.”

“So Virtus has developed CoLo-on-Demand to allow Cloud providers to have a cost model which matches their revenue stream in start up or established mode and enjoy the same flexibility that they grant to their customers.”

The problem for Cloud providers with conventional colocation charging models is that they are based on the peak power load. So even if Cloud providers only need say 3kW in their data centre racks initially and maybe more ultimately, they usually have to commit to having more than is needed at the start of their contract. That makes it a very high cost in the early days of operation and a big long term commitment for small companies.
“What we’ve done instead,” said Cresswell, “is to produce a colocation service where you pay for what you choose and choose what you want, when you want. After month one there is no time commitment, at the end of each month you pay for the space and power, based on how many kilowatts you have used”.

Virtus has set aside one of its halls in their north London data centre (which is 30 minutes and less than 250 microseconds roundtrip from central London), to be a Cloud factory, where Cloud providers can take racks on a low or no commit basis and connect with each other and the other existing Cloud and connectivity providers already in that data centre.

CoLo-on-Demand racks also offer flexible densities that can deliver 2.5kW to 10kW each. As Virtus’ data centres are ‘carrier neutral’ there are many bandwidth providers on-site so that Cloud providers can get the diversity and performance advantages that multiple carriers bring.

Not only does Virtus take all the risk out of data centre use by aligning the Cloud provider’s cost model with its revenue model, the company also offers a no-cost advice and pre-staging facility at its London data centres, as well as 24/7 support service on site to assist in design, build, migration and to run tasks for customers.