Virgin Media Business is offering a virtual cloud data centre service on its fibre network, with hourly fees and no set-up charges.
The virtual private data centre (VPDC) offering uses cloud services from Savvis‘ data centre in Slough, which already serves customers such as the Ministry of Justice, and will be provided over Virgin’s fibre network, which is marketed to business customers as Big Red Internet. Virgin expects to reach mostly companies with around 250 to 1000 users, and will compete with rivals on price as well as on terms and conditions.
“You can start at 9am, and build a data centre in 90 minutes,” said Barron. “If, God forbid, you want to shut it down at lunchtime, you would pay no more than your hourly fees. Something that would have previously takebn up to three years, acn be done in one morning.”
As with Big Red Internet, Virgin wants business customers on its network because they operate at different hours to its largely consumer user base, and have a mostly empty network to play with.
Customers build their data centre by dragging and dropping virtual servers, and selecting parameters such as the operating system, CPUs, RAM size and storage. At any point, the user can ask for a quote, and be told how much the set-up would cost for a month.
Figures are hard to pin down, because of the number of variables, said Virgin Media Business managing director Mark Heraghty. However, in a demonstration, eWEEK Europe saw a virtual data centre with six servers (both Linux and windows) priced at £1600 per month. Two more servers were added, and the price went up by £500 per month – but Virgin assured us that the user of such a data centre couild give back those two servers at any time, and only pay for the hours of use (we make that about 70p per hour) .
Virgin offers three levels of service – Premier has a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.995 percent availability, Essential offers 99.9 percent, and Balanced offers 99.99 percent.
To start with, most customers will be existing Virgin VPN users, Virgin spokespeople said, and many will try out a number of servers. “People will be taking their first step into the cloud world,” said Matt McCloskey, head of applications and services at Virgin Media Business, describing described one trial customer, which ran multiple aplpications on windows 2003, and wanted to test Windows 2008. Having b uilt a temporary virtual data centre to run its tests on, the company was now considering moving wholesale to a VPDC, said McCloskey.
McCloskey and Heraghty emphasised that their offering would take the fear out of cloud by offering high levels of security and reliability. The combination with Virgin’s network will also address the other main concern with the cloud – physical access to remote services – said Virgin spokespeople.
German foreign minister warns Russia will face consequences for “absolutely intolerable” cyberattack on ruling party,…
Google is reportedly laying off at least 200 staff from its “Core” organisation, including key…
Investor appeasement? Apple unveils huge $110 billion share buyback program, as sales of iPhone decline…
Tesla retreats from pioneering gigacasting manufacturing process, amid cost cutting and challenges at EV giant
No skynet please. After the US, UK and France pledge human only control of nuclear…
Microsoft's AI investments continue in south east Asia, after investments in Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, as…
View Comments
The news that Virgin Media Business has launched what it calls its first ‘true cloud product’ is interesting and comments from MD Mark Heraghty are particularly revealing.
Heraghty highlights that confusion is still a huge issue when it comes to businesses adopting the cloud and he is right to do so. In many cases businesses don’t fully understand the term, despite widespread media attention and industry analysis over the past few years.
From our perspective at Bull, the key to any successful cloud implementation is to keep the best interests of the end users at the heart of everything. Rather than making a huge jump, migration needs to be an evolutionary journey that will ultimately provide a greater range of choice for users.
Bull’s journey management methodology involves guiding customers on a ‘step-by-step’ journey to the cloud at a speed that suits them. We believe that this kind of approach is essential if businesses are going to realise the potential added value of IT, rather than simply regarding it as a cost.
Speed and flexibility will always be the two defining factors in any successful cloud implementation – especially for the confused customer who may have a number of fears about migrating to the cloud. Each business will be different, needing to move at a different pace in order to ensure that the company can learn to trust in the model.
Moving straight to the public cloud is likely to be a case of ‘too much, too soon’ for many and the security of the cloud is a natural concern for those businesses who view the cloud with trepidation. With that in mind, an initial adoption of the private cloud makes sense – as businesses are reassured that their data is secure and they know exactly where it is located at all times.
Andrew Carr, sales and marketing director, Bull UK & Ireland