Hosted Solutions, the eight-year-old infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company acquired last year by ABRY Partners, the private equity house, for $144 million, is branching into the cloud business with an “over-architected” platform called the Stratus Trusted Cloud.

It’s built around state-of-the-art best-of-breed widgetry from Sun, EMC, Cisco, F5, Juniper and VMware.

Stratus is targeted at production deployments, not the test-and-development crowd.

The company claims to be different from other cloud merchants, which it says are merely repurposing legacy infrastructure and dare not offer service level agreements (SLAs).

It’s built its widgetry on what it figures is the industry’s most robust, scalable, fully redundant architecture and users get a “Four9s” SLA that guarantees no more than four-and-a-half minutes of downtime a month.

The company’s current hosting and managed services business is East Coast-bound. Hosted means to peddle Stratus nationally to SMEs – the under $250 million set – and expects to run into competition from, oh, say, Verizon, which it claims doesn’t have the service experience it’ll need to deliver on its pretensions.

Hosted, on the other hand, is leveraging its experience in hosting production environment for hundreds of companies including IBM, Sony Ericsson, the Atlanta Falcons, Bank of America and Motricity. Roughly 5% of its existing customer base is large accounts; the rest are SMEs.

It will also bundle its “hi-touch” consulting with its cloud; it’s sacrificing the “instant-on” come-on of other clouds to offer its clients the ability to design and implement customized solutions that meet their specific requirements.

The “let’s-think-about-this-now” approach is meant to reassure customers still nervous about the cloud.

Stratus is described as massively scalable and multi-tenant with built-in high availability and automatic resource balancing. It will provide business continuity, shared load balancing, virtual desktop infrastructure, security and applications management.

The company says Stratus is designed to provide an added level of assurance to companies that their data and entire infrastructure is being administered in a trusted manner, acting in accordance with a full range of governance, risk management and compliance regulations.

There are no proprietary APIs involved in Stratus. It offers Windows, Linux and Solaris configurations.

Hosted Solutions comparison-shopped and considered IBM and HP before deciding to go with Sun blades for the Stratus server farm largely because of their density. It reportedly did a lot of consulting with Sun cloud engineers in laying it out. It has tier three redundancy.

Hosted Solutions COO Kip Turco (pictured above) said the company did between $36 million and $37 million last year from its collection of 800 clients and expects to do $50 million this year.

ABRY bought the company for its recurring revenues, low churn, long contracts and the space’s barriers to entry, he said. Stratus pricing will start at around $2,500-$3,500 a month for 5GHz-10GHz of processing power, an appropriate amount of RAM, a slice of storage, operating system, middleware, Internet access and firewall.

If cloud customers want Hosted to manage the widgetry for them, it can be arranged.

The company has five data centers divided among Boston, Raleigh and Charlotte. Turco says, “People will always know where their data is.”

Cloud Computing Expo: More Than 60 Companies Sponsored or Exhibited at Cloud Computing Expo New York April 2009
Cloud Computing Conference & Expo West and East (past two events) were sponsored by more than 60 leading global cloud computing technology providers, including: 3Tera, Active Endpoints, AppSense, AppZero, Aria Systems, CA, Inc., Certeon, Cloud.com, Composite Software, Cordys, Corporate Technologies, Cycle Computing, DataDirect Technologies, EMC,, ExactTarget, FreedomOSS, IBM, Intel, Intel SOA Products Group, iTKO, J9 Technologies, Krugle, LynuxWorks, MeettheBoss.com, Metron, Microsoft, mindSHIFT, Moderro Technologies, Mosso, Nastel, Netmagic Solutions, OpenSpan, ParaScale, Platform Computing, QuantumXML, Red Hat, RightScale, Sensedia, Sun Microsystems, Supermicro, Symantec, Tap In Systems, Tranxition, Tripwire, VIRTERA, VMware, Web Age Solutions, and Zeus Technology.

More Than 100 Sponsors and Exhibitors Expected in Silicon Valley
Upcoming Cloud Computing Conference & Expo 2009 West event, which will take place November 2-4, 2009, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley is estimated to have more than 100 sponsors and exhibitors.

For sponsorship and exhibit opportunities please contact Cloud Computing Expo sales department at 201 802-3021 (events at sys-con.com).

Cloud Computing Expo New York April 2009 Sold Out With Record Participation
2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, colocated with 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo presented the most distinguished faculty of speakers on any technology conference taking place in 2009. Speakers, general session and keynote presenters included such names as: ,Ajay Anand (Yahoo!), Alan Williamson (AW 2.0 Ltd), Anthony Arrott (Trend Micro), Bill McColl (Cloudscale), Bob Quinn (3Leaf Systems), Brian H. Prince (Microsoft), Brian Zanghi (Kadient), Bryan Wade (ExactTarget), Clod Barrera (IBM), Daniel Beveridge (VIRTERA), David Bernstein (Cisco), David Bressler (Progress Software), David Douglas (Sun Microsytems), David Linthicum (Blue Mountain Labs), Doug Tidwell (IBM), Ed Sullivan (Aria Systems), Glenn Brunette (Sun Microsystems), Jeff Bauer (Forbes.com), Jeremy Geelan (SYS-CON Media), Jim Rymarczyk (IBM), Joe Gregorio (Google), Joel York (Xignite), John Barr (Yieldex), John du Pre Gauntt (Media Dojo), John Laferriere (Corporate Technologies), Jon Pyke (Cordys), JP Morgenthal (J.P. Morgenthal Blog), Kenneth Oestreich (Egenera), Kevin L. Jackson (Dataline), Kristof Kloeckner (IBM), Lucian Lipinsky de Orlov (VIRTERA), Martin Ingram (AppSense), Matt Holleran (Emergence Capital), Michael Hill (IBM), Omer Trajman (Vertica), Owen Garrett (Zeus Technology), Patrick Kerpan (CohesiveFT), Pau Garcia-Mila (eyeOS), Peter Coffee Salesforce.com), Peter Nickolov (3Tera), Phil Fritz (IBM), Prasad Rampalli (Intel), Raghavan Srinivas (Intuit), Ranjith Ramakrishnan (Cumulux), Reuven Cohen (Cloud Interoperability Forum), Rich Wolski (University of California), Ronnie Thomson (Quark), Russ Daniels (HP), Sajai Krishnan (ParaScale), Scott Wiener (Cloud9 Analytics), Simon Wardley (Canonical), Stephen Elliot (CA), Steve Milroy (OnTerra Systems), Stuart Charlton (Elastra), Thorsten von Eicken (RightScale), Tien Tzuo (Zuora), Tim Crawford (Stanford University), Vik Chaudhary (Keynote Systems), Warren Wilbee (Microsoft), Werner Vogels (Amazon.com), William Fellows (The 451 Group).