Skytap eyes alternatives to Savvis

Cloud test and dev service provider, Skytap plans to expand to other colo facilities beyond its Savvis data center in Tukwila, Washington, next year, according to Brett Goodwin, VP of marketing and biz dev at Skytap.

Savvis always seemed like an odd choice for Skytap which recevied funding early on from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“It’s part of our 2012 plan to expand and explore our options,” Goodwin said refering to the company’s existing colocation agreement with Savvis. He declined to get into the matter further. Savvis was acquired by CenturyLink earlier this year.

Goodwin said Skytap has approximately 150 enterprise customers, mostly in the mid-market, using its cloud service and their requirements for storage, especially, keep growing.

Skytap announced three new features to its cloud service this week. The first is a set of advanced notification features that alert admins when users are close to a threshold limit instead of manually having to check when those users are close to their quotas of storage or CPU usage etc.

The second feature is a self-healing capability that auto detects when a VPN connection has broken and reconnects it. This is important for users doing hybrid cloud that need to maintain a connection between their private and public cloud environment.

And lastly Skytap is now supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for users that have multiple hypervisors in their infrastructure, beyond just VMware. This is helpful for users exporting workloads from Skytap back into a private infrastructure that runs on Xen, KVM or Windows Hyper-V, for example.

“Over time we’ll see ever more commodization in the hypervisors,” said Goodwin.