The French IT vendor and provider of outsourcing services Bull is making its next move into the markets for on-demand infrastructure and software. Its new extreme factory service, due to come online in January 2011, will offer both Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings, powered by its own servers.

Bull recommends the solution for large organizations as a way to address workload peaks, to small and medium-size enterprises that cannot afford to invest in larger-scale IT infrastructure, and to creative media studios that need computing resources for processing of high-definition video, 3D special effects, or conversion to different video formats.

At the start, extreme factory will run on about 20,000 processor cores, with more slated to come online in the future. The offering is based on an open-source system and can run all standard processing codes. It is an open environment that was built on using open-source components integrated, tested and packaged by Bull.

Data centers that will support the offering house bullx B500 servers and B505 accelerator blades, powered by Intel Xeon processors. The servers are linked by an InfiniBand QDR network.

Bull will be offering compute power at €0.2 per core per hour or €0.3 per core per hour, depending on the number of servers used and overall usage time. Storage will be priced between €0.15 per Gb per month and €0.3 per Gb per month, depending on the number of storage systems used and usage time.

The vendor will be offering consulting services at €1,300 per day, and SaaS pricing will be determined based on software publishers’ tariffs.

Bull built the solution in collaboration with numerous independent software vendors, including Scilab, whose digital processing software is available to extreme factory customers. Another software partner is Bakery, a developer of software for 3D imaging.

The other two partners are ESI, provider of virtual-prototyping solutions, and CD-adapco, which offers solutions for engineering simulation.