Arrow Adds Public Clouds To IaaS Arsenal

"We recognize that everywhere up and down the value chain … everyone is looking at augmenting their compute power in a public, on-demand fashion," said Lee Fawcett, vice president of the Arrow Fusion business unit, the cloud computing services division of Englewood, Colo.-based Arrow ECS, a unit of Arrow Electronics.

With its public cloud offering, Arrow ECS has teamed up with Terremark to offer public cloud servers and storage, solutions that are accessed via the internet.

The new offerings mark Arrow's first foray into the public cloud game. In June, Arrow officially launched its cloud services offerings, targeting the private cloud with a roster of virtual, managed and fully dedicated hosted servers.

With the new public offerings, Arrow Fusion offers its reseller partners -- thousands of which are expanding into the cloud computing space -- several levels of off-site server hosting that includes collocation, full managed hosting and public clouds. Terremark powers the system and enables companies to provision and manager their computing resources through self-service applications supported by a dozen data centers. Terremark's facilities are on several continents and provide connectivity from 160 global carriers, Fawcett said.

Fawcett said the goal of the Terremark partnering and the launch of the public cloud offerings was to give its VARs access to elastic, on-demand and burstable cloud offerings.

"Being able to have elastic compute on-demand is becoming more and more powerful," he said, adding that Terremark has established a strong relationship with mid-sized companies, large enterprises and in the government.

Arrow's public cloud offerings also augment its private cloud services, which includes partnerships with Verio, a small business hosting player; NetEnrich, an IT-as-a-Service offering; and McAfee/MX Logic for email archiving and similar services.

Adding public cloud computing to its portfolio will also help Arrow resellers take on the hybrid cloud market, Fawcett said.

"We believe that as the market evolves the notion of hybrid clouds emerge," he said, adding that public cloud compute capacity will be available to handle spillover from private cloud infrastructures for bursts of activity.

And with public, private and hybrid clouds currently under its belt, Arrow also plans to broaden beyond its current offerings to add new services around business intelligence as a service and more vertically-focused services in the near future.