StrataScale, Inc., a provider of productivity enhancing managed hosting solutions, today revealed that its clients are demanding greater flexibility and control in their IT infrastructure. Faced with stretched resources, many small and mid-tier businesses are migrating to outsourced IT solutions that can deliver improved efficiency and flexibility. StrataScale’s server hosting product, IronScaleSM, features on-demand control of servers, security, storage, and network management from anywhere at anytime in a single, turnkey solution. This new level of flexibility and control allows clients to do more with less by dynamically managing infrastructure and scaling based on business requirements – eliminating the need for capital expenditures and to continually over-commit by purchasing and over-provisioning resources.

“The ability to cost-efficiently scale your IT infrastructure with the requirements of your business as it grows, is critical to the health and success of small to mid-sized companies,” said Bob Laliberte, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “IronScale offers the flexibility to buy only what is needed today, while delivering the features and performance of an enterprise-class solution.”

“Since launching IronScale in December, we’ve had strong interest from companies looking for help to increase their operational efficiency and performance through our IronScale managed hosting solution,” said Yatish Mishra, president and CTO of StrataScale. “Especially in light of a down economy, they are more pressed than ever to streamline resources while improving their productivity. These are huge drivers for solutions such as IronScale, which enables companies to dynamically build, manage, and scale their IT environments as needed.”

StrataScale’s IronScale Infrastructure Fosters SaaS Growth, Helps Mid-Tier Companies

Companies are looking at the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model more seriously than ever as a way to maximize capital efficiencies and streamline IT resources. According to a CMS Watch 2009 IT predictions report, companies will “look more to their SaaS solution providers to offer a full suite of tools and capabilities.” In turn, SaaS providers will require infrastructure platforms like IronScale. According to Tier1 Research senior analyst Antonio Piraino in his “Fall 2008 Managed Hosting & Cloud Computing II” report, Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers “should be seen as fostering the SaaS ecosystem, bringing more SaaS plays to market quicker. As these SaaS providers mature there is value to moving infrastructure over to a managed hoster: higher levels of support, consulting, control over deployment, security and network.”

As small and mid-sized companies build out their IT infrastructures with servers, PCs, networking products, and software, they are often not equipped with the resources to manage it all. Add to this the fact that businesses are increasingly forced to be quicker to market and to rapidly adopt new technologies to maintain competitive advantages. IronScale addresses these challenges through a flexible, dynamic solution with the reliability, security, and performance of its enterprise-class IT environment.

About StrataScale
StrataScale, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of RagingWire Enterprise Solutions, Inc. IronScale automated managed hosting is a product of StrataScale, Inc. With IronScale, you control your entire IT infrastructure from anywhere at anytime via an advanced web portal. IronScale offers instant provisioning and dynamic management of physical servers, security, storage, and networks on-demand in real-time. What clients get is a cost effective enterprise-class managed hosting solution that delivers resource efficiency, flexibility, and performance.

Cisco Systems recently released a case study they completed with the development team at StrataScale, Inc. talking about their 100% uptime guarantee and the high-end Nexxus data center switch deployed through their environment.

StrataScale is a player in the field of managed server hosting. Their product, IronScale seems to making a decent amount of noise. We’ll continue to watch them as they evolve.

Click here to read the case study.

The idea, as outlined in this article by David Meyer, is that people would buy “heavily subsidized” (cheap) PCs, but then pay charges based on how much computing time and processing power they used.

Be sure to read the rest in Meyer’s article. Note that this is speculation based on a patent filed by Microsoft: I’m not aware of any concrete plans from Microsoft to roll this out, but I thought it’d be fun to discuss.

If they do, however, I can’t see it catching on. Who wants to monitor their PC usage for fear of spending too long online or using too much CPU or memory, lest they get a big ding in the form of a hefty bill at the end of the month? Just because people have put up with this sort of thing from their mobile providers, doesn’t mean they’ll get onboard for pay-as-you-go computing. In fact, the experience with cell phone bills is likely to make any smart customer very wary of Microsoft’s metered computing idea. (Note that, on the enterprise side, having the same sort of ability — to pay only for the compute time you use, makes much more sense — but for home users? Not such a hot idea.)

The current proprietary software model for consumer PCs is bad enough. But license fees look like a bargain compared to metered computing — which Microsoft acknowledges will increase the cost of ownership of a PC over the PC’s lifetime. Aside from the cost factor, which is a pretty big downside to start with, there’s the enforcement side. Part of metered computing is the ability to shut off service.

Picture this scenario, if you will: It’s the start of a new billing cycle. You or one of your family members is sitting down at the computer to write that report for work or school that’s due tomorrow. For some reason, a payment wasn’t processed correctly, and suddenly the computer is locked up. Even if you do get the situation ironed out the same days, it’s an hour out of your life getting it smoothed out. Or perhaps the validation server is down, and you’re out of order for the next day while they get it smoothed out. This isn’t far-fetched — people have already been bitten by just this sort of problem with Windows Genuine Advantage.

Contrast this with the open source model: The up-front cost for a Linux distro is either free or very minimal (if you decide to pay for a physical copy rather than download) and the long term cost for updates and use is, well, nothing.

Odds are, this idea is in the nascent stage, and may never be rolled out. With the economy being what it is, I can’t see any vendors making a straight-faced argument to ask customers to pay more for what amounts to less. Maybe I’ve been doing this open source thing too long, though, and gotten used to paying nothing for my desktop usage. Is there demand for pay-as-you-go, or does it get a big thumbs-down? [via]