Australian managed hosting and enterprise telco provider Macquarie Telecom is offering virtual data centers as part of its new LAUNCH range of services.

LAUNCH services have already been deployed in the flagship Intellicentre 2 data center, making it the first multi-site hosting provider to do so in Australia.

Macquarie Telecom said LAUNCH Virtual Data Centre services will give customers near-total control and visibility over their compute and storage use, allowing for significantly greater optimization and scalability than traditional data center environments delivered by other hosting providers.

“Many of our customers told us they wanted more power to respond to the changing business demands they are facing every day, as well as control over the actual resources in their hosted environment,” Aidan Tudehope, managing director of hosting at Macquarie Telecom said.

"With these services, our customers will be able to take command of their IT environment while retaining the highly skilled local support inside our world-class Intellicentre 2 data center.

“It's a logical extension of the Macquarie Telecom portfolio that allows customers to launch services from our acclaimed Management Tools suite  which means that customers can achieve greater value and growth than ever before when using the deep visibility, expert advice, and full control that LAUNCH services provide."

Macquarie Telecom said LAUNCH Virtual Data Centre services will deliver substantial optimization gains by decoupling capacity from physical data center assets, allowing customers to rapidly scale up and re-provision resources in near real time without incurring additional costs or risking downtime.

The suite of fully-managed services is proactively monitored but also offers customers one-click access to adjust not only their technical deployments but the flexible commercial terms which govern their cost and use.

"Most data centers have policies which restrict how and how quickly clients can reassign bandwidth or storage," Tudehope said.

"A virtual data center, on the other hand, provides unprecedented levels of flexibility in how you use your infrastructure: you can quickly reassign backup-dedicated resources for extra scalability, for example, then switch them back once the spike in traffic has passed. It's about trusting customers to make the best use of what they're investing in, and giving them the visibility to do so; we believe the business benefits of doing so are unprecedented in Australia."

The LAUNCH range will also provide rapid self-healing functionality throughout Intellicentre 2, including automated failover and hardware restoration capabilities, to ensure optimal capacity and speed with no customer intervention required.

The release of LAUNCH services will also see Macquarie Telecom extend service levels and operating hours for the Hosting Management Centre, made up of expert engineers located onsite at Macquarie Telecom’s data centers.

"LAUNCH services mark the latest step in providing a uniquely flexible and resilient Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform not just in Intellicentre 2, but ultimately throughout Macquarie Telecom's multiple availability zones across Australia," Tudehope said.