Service provider Savvis is now offering infrastructure as a service, SavvisDirect, that competes with Amazon Web Services. And while it hasn’t done so yet, it may one day soon offer a competitive advantage: daisy-chained data centers that allow systems in one location to automatically fail over to another.

Savvis has been primarily a large enterprise supplier of cloud services, with specialized deployments built to order. It sold them based on long-term contracts, not by the hour as Amazon does. Now it’s entering the on-demand, self-provisioning world of infrastructure as a service, with users able to select the amount of network, storage and CPU that they want with each server. It will sell such servers via monthly subscriptions, however, not by the hour as AWS does.

The company launched SavvisDirect as a beta service on Oct. 10 and is still under review. It’s slated to become a generally available service later this year.

Savvis CEO Andrew Higginbotham said in an interview there were other differences between Amazon and his fledgling IaaS. “If the Gartner Magic Quadrant is real, then Amazon is in the upper right [as a leader] and everyone else is huddled in the bottom left,” he observed in a tip of the hat to AWS.
Network Computing