Gravitas has launched Gravitas Private Cloud, an expandable, secure cloud solution based on leading converged infrastructure systems from VCE.

The Gravitas Private Cloud is an industry vertical cloud, designed for the unique computing and hosting needs of alternative asset managers, from startup to established funds.

Gravitas Private Cloud combines the advantages of cloud computing – flexibility, scalability and lowered upfront costs – with the turnkey infrastructure and security that regulated financial firms require supported by the managed services required to run this effectively. The Gravitas Private Cloud enables deployment of a fully-functional IT system in days, as compared to weeks for traditional cloud solutions. It significantly expands Gravitas cloud services, which were launched in 2009.

Gravitas Private Cloud offers a secure turnkey solution for startup funds, and for established funds a secure multi-tenant cloud environment for hosting, development or disaster recovery. State-of-the-art VCE Vblock Systems enable secure isolation of client data while providing a flexible and powerful pool of integrated networking, computing, storage, virtualisation and management technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC and VMware.

The Gravitas Private Cloud is situated in the Equinix NY4 data centre in New Jersey, located just outside the New York metropolitan area. The company will soon roll out a similar service at the firm's Chicago Equinix CH4 datacenter.

"For our clients, the cloud enables freedom," says Gravitas CEO Jayesh Punater. "With the Gravitas Private Cloud, alternative asset managers have the opportunity to utilize infrastructure-as-a-service and have more flexibility to scale up or down as needed without security concerns. They can be assured that their technology will be as nimble and reliable as their investment decisions."

A number of existing clients have migrated onto the new Gravitas Private Cloud which is now available to new firms. "Vblock systems enable Gravitas to provide an optimised IT infrastructure that ensures secure and scalable performance, which are key requirements for their clients," said VCE President Frank Hauck. "Fully virtualised Vblock systems are an ideal foundation for asset managers to build cloud infrastructures that support mission critical applications securely and confidently, while providing the agility, efficiency and performance so important for today's enterprise IT operations."