We are entering  a period in Information Technology where the cloud computing and Infrastructure 2.0 movements are evolving beyond just buzzwords to become action items to evolve operations and processes.  This year is shaping up to be a big year of hybrid and private cloud growth as a higher number of IT organizations move from research mode to actual implementations.

Where public cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace have done a great job to bring cloud computing to the masses and drive LOTS of awareness, a large percentage of IT organizations looking to adopt cloud based solutions demand a greater level of features and sophistication at the networking and security layers then what is provided by the larger "public" cloud providers.  Enter providers like Carpathia Hosting who specialize in a wide range of IT hosted and managed solutions to fill the void left by public cloud providers.  This morning Carpathia is unveiling the next generation of their cloud computing service dubbed InstantOn.

Servicing customers from 12 data centers across North America and Europe in sectors such as consumer web, SaaS & ISV’s to Federal Agencies and System Integrators, Carpathia manages and deploys a wide range of sophisticated and demanding workloads.  This range of customers and workload use cases has Carpathia managing a cloud storage pool currently over 24 petabytes in size, and a network where approximately 1% of the internet’s traffic flows across it.  The key for them has been to build a platform that allows them to be nimble and feature-rich while providing a high-touch level of service demanded by their customer base.

Their platform is build under the key assumption that they will not only be providing a level of flexibility from a control and pricing perspective, but also that some workloads are suited to be augmented/complimented by dedicated infrastructure that can be either physical or virtualized.  This hybrid approach is what will be driving large enterprise cloud adoption this year and next through these early stages.

On top of the hybrid dedicated/elastic, physical/virtualized workload delivery Carpathia has also introduced a layer of access control and auditing into their solution which will allow Enterprise customers, and the like, to maintain tracking and awareness of their cloud usage/practices while adhering to whichever process and compliance practices they are implementing.

Some highlights of their service offering that stuck out from the demands of their Federal customers and Integrators are:

• NIST 800.53 aligned, designed to support FISMA Moderate and DIACAP Mac2-pulic
• DoD disk scrub on de-provision
• RSA Token support for their portal, VM authentication & VM console
• Automated daily compliance scans and workflow alerts for non-compliance

Although these fall under the tagline of a Federal Compliant Feature Set they are a sampling of what a more traditional dedicated, in-house, "large enterprise" practices that will still have a place in tomorrow’s cloud computing deployments.

The work to architect and deliver this new version of their cloud platform has transpired over several quarters and culminated in a partnership with Citrix Systems.  It is a win-win for Carpathia and Citrix to join forces to make sure ANY workload demands can be handled while adopting Infrastructure 2.0 type practices and the two will be working together to make sure future customer demands that are "outside the box" get rolled into the Citrix Cloud offering roadmap.

A good example of this new platform and Citrix partnership in action is SugarSync who has selected Carpathia to be their managed service provider for their digital backup and sharing service.

Carpathia has posted some footage of interviews with their CTO John Greaves and Ctirix CTO Simon Crosby on the service launch site here.