Federated data center operator OnApp is to buy virtual server manager SolusVM, in a bid to more service providers to use its Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud hosting and federated cloud services.

SolusVM is used by some 2000 small cloud service providers, and OnApp will give them all access to the OnApp Federation, a virtual aggregation of data centers across the world.

The service provider claims that its OnApp Market is potentially the world’s biggest cloud service, with clients being offered wholesale computing, memory, storage and content delivery networking (CDN) capacity from 170 data center operators.

The addition of 2,000 SolusVM (virtual machines) service providers to the Federation could create the critical mass that convinces cloud service purchasers to start buying from on OnAPP, according to its CEO Ditlev Bredahl, who says the federation currently has 3000 customers, and sluggish rate of transactions.

“We’ve been brilliant at building the supply, but not so great at getting people to buy it,” said Bredahl. “It is slowly happening, but we want to speed up the process.”

At the moment OnApp is a bit like Alibaba.com without the customers, he said.

Bredahl claimed the companies, with joint revenue of around half a billion dollars a year, will create sufficient critical mass to convince potential clients to use the services.

The addition of SolusM’s virtual machines into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering will speed up capacity provision and make it easier for existing clients to use this option, according to Bredahl.

“Bringing the Solus community into OnApp will create a huge boost on the demand side for our services and enable SolusVM providers to offer quick and easy cloud servers that can be deployed on demand, all over the world,” said Bredahl.

The SolusVM team, led by Phill Bandelow, will become part of the OnApp technical team.

The OnApp product range now includes IaaS, bare-bones cloud servers running on SolusVM and integrated cloud bare metal, hybrid servers, storage and CDN based on Xen, KVM, VMware and OpenVZ.