It's the year for everything virtual

The Australian technology systems vendor Vigabyte believes it is has made a breakthrough in the world of virtualisation. It has announced its virtual infrastructure services suite is now available after conducting trials with over one hundred small business and enterprise customers.

These companies included AlphaWest for a project management application, web solution and graphic design companies and others who needed a raft of servers for testing purposes.

The service allows companies to instantly purchase and scale up their hosting, server and data capacity through a simple web console.

"The scalability of the offering allows us to expand our data resources immediately to meet the needs of our businesses, and we can also re-sell the virtual hosting package to our customers, which creates a terrific revenue stream for us," said Ben Bradshaw, director of Brisbane-based web development and search engine optimisation company BJB Global.

"We looked at the standard hosting offerings in the market and decided Vigabyte was the model we needed as it allows flexibility and scalability in our IT environments at a very competitive price."

The new model of virtualised hosting brings productivity to the data centre by enabling IT managers to purchase and connect Vigabyte servers to their enterprise IT networks by offering unlimited RAM and storage without the restrictions and time delays associated with deploying physical servers. Businesses benefit from the speed of immediate demands of the business without disruption. Companies pay as they go and payment can be as simple as using a credit card. When the company's sign up they have access to a control panel to enable them to scale up and down as needed.

"Vigabyte is a virtual data provider that challenges existing IT infrastructure models by offering enterprises on demand IT services on the fly, at a reasonable cost," said Vigabyte founder and managing director Anoosh Manzoori.

"The ability to offer dedicated server prices to enterprises, below that of the shared hosting packages that exist across the industry currently, marks a significant breakthrough in the web hosting market."

The company said it believes its mix of competitive pricing and innovative technology will have a significant impact on the IT infrastructure market. The company uses a network of clustered servers, SAN storage and internally developed management tools and applications to create a series of individual servers called 'Vigabyte Servers'.

Manzoori said the company plans to invest millions of dollars into a super computer in the next 12-18 months, which will have the equivalent memory and storage of 10,000 desktop PCs. They expect to have 5000 customers from a diverse range of businesses including the very large enterprises such as banks.

"Corporate data centres are bursting at the seams and the flexibility of being able to provision on the fly and shut down on the fly is very appealing to enterprises," said Manzoori.

Vigabyte is built on high-capacity infrastructure, deploying a mix of Sun Microsystems storage area network hardware and servers and VMware virtualisation software. The Vigabyte server network is housed at the Optus data centre in Melbourne with this data centre providing the security and redundancy in terms of data. Physical security is also looked after by the Optus data centre. Vigabyte customers can use any operating system.

Analyst company Gartner had no one available to comment on this new model of virtual hosting and IDC also declined to comment, citing the reason as not knowing enough about the model. So we wait to see whether Vigabyte can meet its target successfully in the next 12-18 months.