Services that provide cloud-based computing capacity, application platforms or applications themselves have sprung up like mushrooms after rain over the past few years. Cloud providers have become one of the most important markets for data center providers, who have repackaged, rebuilt and renamed their product portfolios to appeal to these customers.

So what is it that cloud providers look for in a data center provider? A cloud company named Project Hosts has recently taken some colocation space in Toronto, and its CEO and co-founder Scott Chapman shared with us some information about the provider’s data center strategy and requirements.

Project Hosts, based in Conneautville, Pennsylvania, provides business applications by Microsoft hosted on custom-designed cloud infrastructure at multiple colocation sites around the world. Most of its business comprises of Microsoft’s project management applications, but it also provides SharePoint and customer relations management (CRM) solutions.

“We like to talk about our solution as being a custom-cloud solution,” Chapman says. As he explains, it means a dedicated infrastructure for every client with lots of add-on features.

That is different from commodity clouds, such as Amazon’s, where there is no customization and the infrastructure is shared, and from standard clouds, where there is more customization, but customers still share infrastructure.

The custom-cloud footprint
Hardware-wise, Project Hosts’ cloud infrastructure solutions for its customers consist mainly of Dell servers and Cisco switches. The company uses Microsoft’s Hyper V virtualization platform and has a number of homegrown data center management, provisioning and billing tools.

Project Hosts typically uses one of two types of data center services, depending on where it is deploying each client’s infrastructure: colocation and managed servers. It uses the former in North America and the latter in Europe.

The cloud provider – which Chapman and the company’s CTO James Flavin launched in 2003, funding it themselves – today serves its nearly 200 clients out if nine data center locations, including the most recent Toronto site. There are two in the Silicon Valley, two in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one in Cleveland, one in Glasgow and one in Madrid.

Services out of the Madrid location are provided by a different company using Project Hosts’ hosting model, Chapman explains. It is almost like a franchise.

Room to grow
Project Hosts starts with a small footprint at every new data center location. “We’ll start with one or two cabinets and then we’ll add on from there,” Chapman says.

As the customer base grows, so does the footprint. “Our revenue growth, I would say, is what drives [the company’s data center requirements].

“If we have more customers, we’re going to have more servers.”

Project Hosts team does not chase the wild goose of trying to predict capacity growth. Instead, it simply will not move into a colocation site that may fill up quickly after its servers are installed there.

“We try not to reserve the space and power capacity,” Chapman says. “We try not to go into a data center that’s almost full, for example.”

The company takes space at data centers that are not likely to reach capacity within the following two years or so. It is not much of an obstacle if its servers in a facility are not next to each other.

Firewall and routing is on the colo provider
Project Hosts absolutely needs multiple network carriers’ services to be available at the facility, although that feature has become a de facto industry standard among colocation providers.  The company typically relies on the data center provider for routing, firewall and intrusion detection, Chapman says.

The cloud firm likes to have the ability to set its own firewall rules, however. It needs to be able to specify a range of customer Internet Protocol (IP) addresses outside of the data center, for example, so that devices with those addresses can access the infrastructure behind the data center firewall.

“We need the data center [provider] to be able to accommodate that in the firewall that they’re managing for us,” Chapman says.

Growing up and out
Of course Project Hosts is just one of many types of providers of cloud-based services, but there are many similar to it, and its requirements reflect many others’.

One constant, for example, is that companies like these start small and, in many cases, grow big.

They grow both up (within existing data centers) and out (into new geographic locations) as they attract more customers. Providers that can support both of these growth vectors are obviously in a great position to capture a large market share in this space, but that does not rule out opportunities for data center companies with fewer sites but competitive basic data center offerings.