Logicworks Managed Hosting Solutions

In an email Q&A, Logicworks President and COO Ken Ziegler discusses the company's new Private Cloud service, which offers an affordable storage solution for small and medium sized business customers, as well as its many benefits, and what helps distinguish it from competing private cloud storage offerings on the market.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) --

The past month has seen the launch of private cloud storage offerings from both REDPLAID and CSC, signaling a growing shift toward companies offering flexible storage that gives customers greater control of their data.

Logicworks is the latest web host to offer Private Cloud service, which provides SMBs with a private storage solution without having to make a significantly large investment.

The service uses VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3, which offers all the benefits of cloud computing without any of the liabilities of a shared environment, making it ideal for fast-growing enterprises, media sites, e-commerce sites and financial services portals. The fully dedicated storage service offers customized environments, based on individual customer requirements. And comparable to managed hosting, the service includes vendor consolidation, reduced CAPEX, and operating efficiency.

In an email Q&A with the WHIR, Logicworks' president and COO Ken Ziegler discusses the company's new Private Cloud service, its many benefits, and what helps distinguish it from competing private cloud storage offerings on the market.

The WHIR: Lately, it seems as though a few cloud providers are launching private cloud solutions. Why do you think there is such an emphasis on providing such a service?

Ken Ziegler: Private cloud hosting offers the majority of the appealing traits of public or consumer cloud solutions, such as reduced CAPEX and pay-as-you grow scalability without sacrificing performance, availability, and security. It also is a dedicated, customizable platform designed to specific business requirements, not a one-cloud-tries-to-fit-all solution.

How does Logicworks' private cloud service differ from the competition?

KZ: Ultimately, our differentiator has never been based on specific technologies, per se, but rather our ability to integrate and manage the latest and greatest offerings from major technology vendors better than our clients could do in-house, because it's all we do. Our private cloud service is no exception in that we extract the maximum value, efficiency, and performance out of the building blocks that make up our solution. For example, we have found that VMware is better than other virtualization approaches for private clouds because of its ease of management, pervasiveness, performance, and compatibility. Moreover, we provide VMware on the latest generation Intel CPUs for improved virtualization performance. We offer replicated storage via either iSCSI or 40Gb/s InfiniBand, where the performance of the latter allows us to even virtualize replications with high I/O requirements, such as databases.

Who is this private cloud service intended for?

KZ: Customers who have high-availability requirements are the common denominator. Primarily high-traffic websites and content sites, transactional database-driven SaaS applications, and online retailers all are ideal fits for this service, as they have performance, security and compliance requirements, and simply can't afford to go down. Clients such as Six Apart, NBC, and Factiva are perfect examples of this. We're also seeing more enterprises seeking to have an IT resource platform that is easily split up among business units for internal applications, and our private cloud solution solves that challenge for our clients as well.

What is the pricing structure for the service?

KZ: The pricing depends greatly on client-specific requirements. Solutions start in the $3,500 per month range but typically average in the $15,000 per month range for InfiniBand based solutions. The value proposition is that this is typically a lot less expensive than buying the hardware, data center space, expert labor, software licensing, bandwidth, and all of the other costs associated with the customer having to manage the infrastructure by themselves.

How does this new private cloud offering align with Logicworks' overall cloud strategy?

KZ: We view the term cloud to mean a few things. The term "cloud" is a concept that often tends to mask the underlying complexity. Managed hosting has traditionally offered these types of complex solutions, but the term "cloud" is a little easier to grasp for the non-technical decision makers. Cloud can also refer to Infrastructure-as-a-service. The proliferation of moving your network out of your office closet or data center makes a lot of sense for companies whose core competencies aren't IT-specific. A full staffed IT department is no longer attractive if it has large CAPEX requirements and a less than fully utilized staff. Delivering IT through the right collection of partners whose services reside in the cloud are a lot more efficient and better maps IT spending to current business requirements.

Even prior to offering a private cloud service, our complex managed hosting solutions already put Logicworks in the infrastructure-as-a-service category, and that portion of the cloud market will continue to be a growth area for us, as many of our customers will chose a hybrid complex-managed/private cloud approach to their system deployments.
Virtualization software provides the scalability, redundancy, and dynamic resource allocation that enables us to improve upon our high-availability solutions, which are inherently in-the-cloud to begin with, making Private Cloud Hosting a natural product to develop and launch given our existing competencies.