CSC promises ten week takeoff to private cloud

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 17:09

Business IT - Technology

 

Australian CIOs resisting a move to cloud computing because they want to keep their data close can now have a private cloud built  in their own premises and managed by a third party.  With a starting price of $35,000 a month CSC today released its BizCloud private cloud solution in Australia - almost six months after the service was first offered to US clients.

Siki Giunta, global vice president for cloud services and software, who is visiting Australia to launch the service said she had visited around 30 organisations in the last week to explain the new offering. She nominated AMP as a potential early user of the service, along with other companies in financial services, mining and insurance. She said there were already a handful of local companies keen to start up their own BizCloud.

Internationally the company has sold BizCloud to organisations including DuPont and Motorola Mobility.

Claiming that BizCloud would allow a company to have its on-premise cloud up and running in ten weeks, Ms Giunta said that the company would train about 20-25 local CSC staff and new hires to support the rollout of the service. Paul Gibbs has been appointed as general manager for cloud computing and services for CSC in Australia.

Three versions of the BizCloud service are available, which runs off V-blocks (a cloud computing building block or fabric sold by Cisco, VMware and EMC) set up in the user's premises, but managed and provided as a service by CSC. Customers pay for 33 per cent of the capacity of their cloud up front (with fees ranging from $35,000 a month to $75,000 a month with year long terms) and are then charged on a usage basis as they access capacity above 33 per cent.

CSC also released its rate card and discount plan for a range of different service levels, which is about as simple to navigate as a mobile phone contract. It offers four different service levels starting from $53 entry level bronze to $3,548 a month for the top of the range platinum service.

Ms Giunta said that the on-premises solution took about ten weeks to implement because of the extent of design and planning that went into crafting the right solution for a client. She said CSC would continue to offer public cloud services which could be accessed in a matter of hours.

While the V-block hardware and software will be physically located in the user's premises and behind their firewall, it remains a CSC asset, with the company being paid the monthly fee for providing a range of infrastructure, platform or software as a service.

BizCloud features CSC's CloudCompute infrastructure as a service architecture which is also used in CSC's own data centres. The company says this will allow users to easily adopt a hybrid cloud - using BizCloud private clouds for certain applications while offloading other functions such as disaster recovery or test and development to the public cloud.