For others, self-service isn’t so much about visibility and control, but scaling out the data center with maximum efficiency while maintaining high availability.

Fetch Technologies writes specialized enterprise search and data management software. The software consists of several tiers, including Web servers, application servers, “extraction” servers and a database, said Rick Parker, Fetch director of IT. To minimize the time it takes Fetch employees to configure and provision the application, the company implemented cloud management software from Platform Computing, which in the past year has repurposed its grid and cluster management software for private clouds.

At the same time, Fetch is beginning to offer its application as a hosted Software as a service (SaaS) model. To keep down data center buildout costs and maximize uptime, Fetch plans to leverage several colocation facilities near its El Segundo, Calif., headquarters, and “stripe” the virtual machines that make up a customer’s application instance across them.

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