Cloud-like service offers customizable servers, storage

A new managed hosting offering targeted at mid-sized businesses lets customers quickly provision and reconfigure servers, storage and network capacity through a secure Web portal.

RagingWire, which spent the last eight years offering co-location to enterprise-class customers from a 200,000-square foot data center in Sacramento, Calif., has announced a new business unit called StrataScale for smaller customers that prefer to offload the burden of managing their own IT resources.

"Customers told us they wanted more services. They wanted us to take over these layers of infrastructure," says Douglas Adams, vice president of sales and marketing.

RagingWire says its high-end enterprise customers are still looking for pure co-location services, in which the customer rents space and brings in its own equipment. By contrast, the new StrataScale service, known as IronScale, offers dedicated, bare-metal servers along with storage, security and network resources. StrataScale has so far resisted using the ubiquitous "cloud computing" buzz-phrase to describe its services, although its offer of flexible computing resources outside the customer data center would seem to fit that industry segment.

"Analysts are pushing us to use [the word 'cloud'], says Yatish Mishra, CTO and founder of RagingWire. "We're a platform that enables cloud. I'm not sure we're a direct cloud player."

With IronScale, customers rent by the month or year, and can design their own server environments through an easy-to-use interface, company officials say. (Compare server products.)  

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