“NaviSite Inc.”, cloud-enabled enterprise hosting provider, announced their new next-generation cloud-computing platform. The new enterprise-class infrastructure platform is called “NaviSite Managed Cloud Services”, also known as “NaviCloud”. The new Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) uses the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), and is integrated with VMware vCloud and VMware vSphere4. The current managed services utilizes the Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series “Nehalem EP” processors and VMware’s vSphere 4 virtualization platform. NaviSite proclaims that the new platform to be high performance with on-demand, scalable infrastructure. NaviCloud is designed to be flexible to adapt to the changing customer requirements and business environment, to reduce operating costs while retaining high performance and scalability.

Denis Martin, Chief Technology Officer of NaviSite, said:

“NaviCloud is truly a next-generation enterprise-class architecture that addresses the cost, performance and security requirements of larger enterprises. We spent a lot of time with NaviSite customers, learning about their cloud hosting requirements and….[added]…customized development into NaviCloud. The result is a high-performance, scalable platform for delivering cost efficient, on-demand, usage based services.”

The customers can choose to buy compute, memory, and storage from the “resource pool”. These can be configured for use in both a “self managed mode” or “fully managed mode”. Self-managed mode is described as a system whereby customers create virtual machines with their choice of operating systems and software. In fully managed, customers can choose the monitoring software to be used on the virtual environments for systemwide monitoring.

William Shelton, Senior Director of Product Management at VMware, stated:

“[VMware vSphere 4 and vCloud] transform IT infrastructure, enabling service providers to offer IT as dynamic services to customers who can change compute capacity on-demand to save time and money. NaviSite’s new Managed Cloud Services offering delivers on this promise and will enable customers to focus less on infrastructure maintenance and more on initiatives that help grow their businesses.”

Resource management of the virtual environments is provided by the NaviCloud customer portal, which NaviSite has configured to allow the self-managed or full-managed options and which offers full transparency of resources and service levels.