Logicworks Unveils InfiniCloud Public Cloud Offering

Logicworks is looking to create a public cloud offering that will entice businesses to move key applications to the cloud.

In most public cloud environments, enterprises are content to run test-and-development workloads or non-crucial applications, according to Kenneth Ziegler, president and COO of Logicworks. With its new InfiniCloud, the company has created a public cloud solution with the performance and security necessary for mission-critical applications, Ziegler said.

"When cloud computing first came out, it certainly was pretty buzzy," said Ziegler in an interview with eWEEK, noting, however, that there were concerns raised about performance and security.

Logicworks' InfiniCloud, which was released to beta Nov. 30, will compete with some heavyweights in the public cloud arena, including Amazon with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). InfiniCloud offers many of the same benefits as those other infrastructure-as-a-service solutions, including being open to anyone who wants to use it and enabling customers to pay only for the resources they use.

However, Logicworks is looking to take advantage of its history as a managed hosting provider and apply that experience to the cloud  to gain an advantage over Amazon and its ilk, Ziegler said. InfiniCloud offers customers a full set of managed services for such tasks as application monitoring, server patching, firewall security, intrusion detection, disaster recovery, load balancing and database clustering. It also offers compliance with such regulations as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and Sarbanes-Oxley, he said.

The migration of workloads and applications into InfiniCloud and integrating InfiniCloud with in-house IT environments can be managed by Logicworks, Ziegler said. In addition, VMs (virtual machines) can be moved in and out of InfiniCloud—and between in-house IT and other Logicworks systems—in both open-source cloud and VMware formats.

Logicworks also offers high-end servers sporting Intel's Xeon 5600 "Westmere" six-core processors, 40 Gb/s storage networking, and the option of SATA or SAS RAID 10 disk arrays. Such high-performance infrastructure tools are a differentiator with other public cloud solutions, said Ziegler, which tend toward being lower end commodity servers.

Ziegler said such capabilities will make InfiniCloud attractive to a wide range of businesses—such as media, financial services, retail and health care—that need the flexibility that cloud environments offer but are concerned about performance and security issues. For example, such tools as remote monitoring and automatic scaling let media sites handle spikes in traffic. In addition, security features such as intrusion detection will be attractive to retail businesses that must comply with PCI requirements, he said.

The beta program for InfiniCloud will run through the rest of 2010, with a full release in January 2011, according to Logicworks. Pricing will be according to RAM-hour, storage and bandwidth use, and Logicworks' managed servers can be bought a la carte for fixed monthly rates.

InfiniCloud comes more than a year after Logicworks jumped into the cloud computing arena with a private cloud offering in June 2009. Logicworks' private cloud offerings, based on VMware's Virtual Infrastructure technologies, are cloud environments that are dedicated to each customer.