As we all know by now, Cloud Hosting is one of the fastest growing services in the IT industry. According to the IDC, spending on cloud services will top $100 billion by 2016! Just a few years ago, it was very hard to find a local cloud provider in your own “neck of the woods.” At the time, your choices were limited to large public cloud providers like Amazon and Rack Space. Clients looking for a hosted private cloud had to look at national companies like ATT and Savvis. Today, cloud providers are everywhere which is a good thing. Clients can analyze cloud solutions from a variety of both local and national providers. Many colocation providers now offer services in the cloud along with their traditional solutions like colocation, dedicated servers and managed hosting. In this article, we will focus on three US regions and a few colocation providers that offer services in the cloud.
East Coast – Xand is a premier facility based data center colocation provider based in the Northeast. They operate state of the art data centers in MA, CT, NY and PA. Along with colocation and managed hosting, Xand offers a robust virtual private cloud solution powered by VMware. John Holland, Xand’s vice president of sales operations, has seen a tremendous growth in the private cloud. According to Holland, “Clients looking for a hosted private cloud are primarily concerned about security and redundancy. Our private, single tenant xCloud solution gives enterprise clients just that and more utilizing our extensive network of six data centers throughout the Northeast.” Other traditional telecom companies like Savvis, ATT and Verizon also offer both public and private hosting in data centers all over the Northeast and Mid Atlantic States.
Central – Chicago has always been a “hot spot” for traditional hosting service like colocation and dedicated servers. Many clients prefer the Chicago area because it is smack dab in the middle of their client base. Instead of hosting on the East or West coasts, they can centralize their infrastructure in the Chicago region and reach customers quicker on both coasts. Located in Oak Brook, IL, Latisys recently introduced their cloud portfolio in March of 2012. Up to that point, Latisys was just a regional provider of data center colocation services in IL, VA, CA and CO. Latisys offers its private cloud solution geared towards mid market and enterprise clients looking for ease of use, scalability and security. Quite a few other local colocation data centers like Steadfast Networks and Singlehop offer both public and private cloud services in the Chicago area as well.
West Coast – The West Coast is full of quality colocation data centers. From Seattle down to San Diego, you will find hundreds of options to choose from. Peer 1 with data centers in Seattle and Silicon Valley launched a public cloud called Zunicore in 2011 and then a private cloud focused on enterprise clients in 2012. Based on VMWare hardware, both solutions offers scalability and a self service portal. Moving south to CA, AIS in San Diego recently launched its VMWare powered IAAS cloud. AIS offers state of the art tier 3 colocation data centers in both San Diego and Phoenix, AZ. The Phoenix area has always been popular for clients looking for disaster recovery solution. With the help of AIS, clients can take advantage of either a private, public or hybrid cloud in CA and have their complete infrastructure mirrored in the Phoenix facility directly connected with a 10Gig connection. Best of all, there is no need to buy servers and other expensive network gear to set up a DR solution.
As you can see, the cloud is here to stay! Each month, more and more legacy colocation and dedicated server providers are offering new cloud service options all over the domestic United States. To learn more about picking the best cloud provider for your unique requirements, please check out our free whitepaper below.