Redstone launches vCloud infrastructure

Redstone is today launching its public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering powered by VMware’s vCloud platform.

Its new IaaS is designed to provide companies with virtualised data centre capacity on demand and builds on the company’s existing networking and hosted, co-location managed IT services.

With five of its own UK-based datacentres, a sixth located in Amsterdam as back up and its own multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network, Redstone is positioning its vCloud service at location sensitive, short-term capacity related or server management outsourcing requirements.

John Roberts, head of managed services at Redstone, told Channel Pro’ s sister title Cloud Pro many of the company’s existing customers were looking for managed cloud services to meet and comply with current data protection regulation.

“I’ve had customers tell me that the Amazons and Googles of this world can’t give them guarantees on where around the world their data will be stored,” he said. “But we can physically show customers around our data centres.”

“They can also manage their own vCloud service or use our customer support centre to provision their needs.”

Roberts also highlighted the opportunity in being first to market with an IaaS based on the VMware platform.

“We’ve been doing what I see as cloud around networks for years and recognised some time ago that we needed to invest in a tier-one virtualisation partner,” he said.

“This gives us the speed to market that, as far I know, none of our competitors have.”

The Redstone IaaS provides standard IT infrastructure components, including servers, storage and archiving. It offers enterprises already virtualising their own infrastructures the lure of slashing internal traditional provisioning timescales from weeks to minutes. It also includes a ‘configurations catalogue’ indexing their previous virtual machine configurations and Redstone’s pre-configurations for one-click provisioning.

“Customers can benefit even if they are familiar with VMware internally via our intuitive management portal,” added Roberts. “But equally, the work is already done for you by using our configurations catalogue.

“We also will do capacity planning exercises and offer advice and training if an organisation wants to set up a private cloud for the first time. And we are offering a trial with free virtual machines so organisations can use the IaaS functionality as they would their own to see how it works for them in a virtual cloud environment.”

Roberts said the company was hoping its managed service wrapper around a leading virtualisation provider’s existing platform will prove attractive to its existing 1,000 customers, which span media, retail, manufacturing, financial services, non-profit and public sector organisations, as well as new ones.

“We’re aiming this at the mid-to-lower tier of the Fortune 250 to the large SMB,” he says.