Hosting company NaviSite has partnered with Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel and VMware to deliver NaviSite NaviCloud Managed Cloud Services, which leverages technologies as Cisco’s UCS (Unified Computing System), Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series processors and platform. It also includes IBM’s XIV Storage System open disk storage product.

NaviCloud is an enterprise-level cloud option, much more so than Amazon, with its EC2 environment.

A key difference between the two offerings, is that with an environment like Amazon EC2, users essentially need only a credit card and can jump on and off as desired. However, with NaviCloud, NaviSite is looking for a base commitment from customers of 100GHz and 80GB of RAM, or about 10 Hewlett-Packard 2x dual-socket ProLiant DL380s with 8GB of RAM each, he said.

NaviCloud gives businesses a highly-virtualized enterprise-level cloud environment. The products from Cisco and VMware, coupled with the latest generation Intel quad-core Xeons are linked via 40 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel.

Customers can buy compute, memory and storage resources from the clouds pool of offerings and can run them either in a self-managed or fully managed mode. If businesses opt for self-service, they can create and configure virtual machines with a choice of operating systems including Windows and Linux and applications.

NaviCloud also can be combined with dedicated infrastructure services, enabling businesses to create hybrid IT environments.

It's a pay-as-you-go environment. Businesses are only billed for what they use.