Savvis Strikes First Notes of Symphony

"It is currently in beta, but we will have the first two service tiers available in the first half of this year and the last tier available during the second half of the year," says Bryan Doerr, CTO of Savvis.

The vendor divides its offering into its essential grade, balanced grade and enterprise offering, and differentiates them by the resources dedicated to each tier, the resource priority and the service-level agreement (SLA).

"When clients look at the essential grade, our lowest tier offering, it has the lowest priority when it comes to resource commitment," explains Doerr. "It has the lowest cost, lightest support model and the simplest architectural characteristics. It is a flat, shared virtual local area network (VLAN) of servers and storage capacity that clients create."

As clients select higher tiered offerings, Savvis adds richer support models, more functionality, stronger security, and greater choice in storage media.

From a compute configuration perspective, users can select the essential grade, which provides access to half a core to two processor cores with between 1 GB and 8 GB of RAM, ranging from approximately $60 per month to a couple hundred dollars per month. The balanced grade can go up to eight cores with between 2 GB and 16 GB of RAM, while the enterprise offering has the same hardware configuration options as the balance grade. "We will offer more services on the enterprise offering, just along different dimensions," says Doerr.

In order to connect clients to the new service, Savvis wrote its own middleware environment and constructed a management portal, according to Doerr. The vendor wrote the top two layers of Symphony's software stack, and "below that, we have the orchestration software and the element management systems that come with the various platforms that the middleware speaks with to create the service."

Since Symphony is built using technology from virtualization provider VMware, Savvis based its application programming interface (API) on VMware's vCloud API. "People seeking to integrate with our API will see a great deal of familiarity," says Doerr. "The lifecycle management of a VPDC is visible through our API. But the controls are obviously extensions to the vCloud API, since the VMware API doesn't have those capabilities."

The vendor expects to take the service live in three datacenters. The first one will be the vendor's beta site on the West Coast of the U.S., followed shortly thereafter by a facility on the East Coast of the U.S., and one in the EMEA region, officials say.

There are tens of clients that have already signed up for the beta service and who represent the spectrum of potential uses. "Representatives from the financial services vertical made up a small part of the spectrum," says Doerr.

Rob Daly