QTS has added a pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering to its portfolio using VMware's cloud software and hardware by Cisco and EMC.

The Overland Park, Kansas-based data center real estate investment trust has provided cloud-based services before, but they took the form of managed hosting, Aditya Joglekar, director of cloud sales, said. The new enterprise cloud offering is a pure IaaS play, “very much focused on infrastructure.”

The technology stack combine Cisco, EMC and VMware products, but it is not the three vendor's pre-integrated cloud hardware-and-software package the three vendors offer as Vblock.

QTS' cloud is built on Cisco servers and networking switches and EMC storage. The software that enables the physical infrastructure to behave like a cloud is VMware's vCloud Suite.

The enterprise cloud is hosted in the company's data centers in Suwanee, Georgia (an Atlanta suburb), and in Santa Clara, California. The Silicon Valley site acts as a disaster recovery facility for the Suwanee one, Joglekar said.

In January, QTS also announced the launch of a similar offering built exclusively for federal government agencies. The federal cloud lives in a data center in Richmond, Virginia (just outside of Washington, D.C.), and in a secondary site in Atlanta proper.

Unlike retail-level IaaS providers like Amazon Web Services, QTS requires its cloud customers to commit to a base amount of cloud resources, paying for them on an annual basis, Joglekar said. “Since we're a real estate company at heart … we are very focused on long-term relationships and long-term contacts with our customers.”

But customers have the option to burst (expand capacity temporarily) when the need arrives and scale back to base level, once the demand drops.

Joglekar said the company already has customers that have either switched from using its colocation services to the enterprise cloud or are augmenting their colocated infrastructure with cloud.

QTS went public in October 2013, trading on the New York Stock Exchange as QTS.