Savvis Shows Its Cloud Spirit

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (TheStreet) -- Service provider Savvis(SVVS Quote) has added more flesh to the bones of its cloud computing strategy, teaming up with Cisco(CSCO Quote) and VMware(VMW Quote) to tie its cloud offerings together.

Savvis unveiled its Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) offering at VMware's VMworld conference early Tuesday, touting the ability to offer compute, storage, networking and security within the same cloud service. Dubbed Project Spirit, a beta version of the offering will go live later this year.

VPDC can create an entire virtual data center at the touch of a button, according to Savvis, which is also attempting to tap into users' tighter IT budgets.

Cloud services, which offer various IT resources via the Internet, have been gaining momentum recently, with companies such as Amazon(AMZN Quote), Microsoft(MSFT Quote) and IBM(IBM Quote) all pushing the technology as a way for firms to avoid the upfront costs of hardware and software.

"Cloud computing generally makes it easier and faster to purchase IT infrastructure and makes it less expensive," said Bryan Doerr, the Savvis CTO, adding that users can easily scale up their systems. "That guesswork can be eliminated [especially] if an application is highly successful over time and grows in demand."

The St.Louis, Miss.-based firm initially offered just compute resources as a cloud service, but is now attempting to put the squeeze on rivals such as Amazon(AMZN Quote), Rackspace(RAX Quote) and AT&T(T Quote) by bringing its different cloud offerings together.

Despite plenty of hype, however, security remains one of the biggest