Layered Technologies Offers Virtual Private Data CenterLayered Technologies Offers Virtual Private Data Center

Utility hosting services provider Layered Technologies on Wednesday made commercially available a virtual private data center, which can be controlled with only a Web browser.

The virtual private data center, tagged by Layered Technologies as the "Super Grid," is comprised of 443 CPUs, and offers 920 Gbytes of RAM and 47 Tbytes of storage. It's based on platforms from Intel and 3tera's AppLogic software.

Layered Technologies promises to get customers up and running in days versus months. The hosting and utility computing services company says it won't require customers to build new facilities or lease co-location space.

High real estate and leasing costs are driving many businesses toward consolidation and virtualization in the data center. Projects today contain enough equipment and have power and cooling needs that average between 5 to 10 million watts that costs to build them range from $150 million to $250 million, according to CS Technology, a provider of technology strategy and implementation services.

The Super Grid can provide service that, in effect, scales from 10 servers to more than 100 servers without causing performance issues, said Layered Technologies. Customers control of their own private grid and can set up a virtual infrastructure using the vendor's visual interface. This includes firewalls, load balancers, web servers, database servers, and Network Attached Storage devices.

Consequently, customers can assemble, deploy, monitor, and manage all their data center infrastructure and applications using a browser.

"It's an ideal solution for enterprises, Web 2.0 companies, and companies with [software-as-a-service] offerings as it allows users to focus on their business without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Our virtual private data center scales efficiently and effectively, so when you need more performance, you simply allocate additional resources," said Todd Abrams, President and COO of Layered Technologies.

Many software-as-a-service offerings don't rely on sharing data between subscribers. For these applications, the Super Grid makes it possible to build an offering by running a copy of an application for each subscriber. Customers can ramp up from a fraction of a CPU to hundreds of servers without touching the code.

For those using Web 2.0, the Super Grid offers more data center capacity and cheaper disaster recovery, the company said. Content and databases are mirrored across the grid that applications reside on, so if a physical server becomes unresponsive, all data remains available and the applications are automatically restarted elsewhere on the grid. As a result, services can be back online within minutes, not hours.

Layered Technologies' virtual private data center starts around $3,996 per month, with a set up cost of $749.