Enterprise hosting provider Logicworks is beta testing a cloud computing service targeted at sophisticated commercial and enterprise-level projects. It's called infiniCloud and the beta will run through the end of the year, with release to follow in January.

It's an on-demand service priced familiarly according to RAM-hour, storage and bandwidth utilization combined with managed services purchased à la carte at fixed monthly rates.

Logicworks president Kenneth Ziegler claims cloud computing has so far been used mostly as a testing and development medium or a way to offload non-critical applications or content. "When we talk about moving ‘real apps' into the cloud, we're targeting profit centers like prime time media sites, financial and healthcare applications, massive multi-player online games, and e-commerce. There is a real need in the marketplace for blending dynamic cloud computing and managed hosting for high-performance applications. We've built our managed cloud services to address this need, starting with infiniCloud."

What's needed, Logicworks says, is performance, integrated managed services and seamless migration and integration with existing enterprise IT.

infiniCloud is advertised as an easy way for the enterprise to take its initial plunge onto the cloud, as well as an evolution path that can adapt to handle mission-critical applications. It's built on three cornerstones:

• Real infrastructure for real applications - Instead of massive pools of commodity servers, infiniCloud is built on state-of-the-art high-performance Xeon Westmere processors, 40 Gbps storage networking and either SATA or 15K SAS RAID 10 disk arrays. It's supposed to deliver higher performance and greater consistency across virtual machines, which is key, Logicworks says, to supporting profit center applications.

• Full suite of managed services - Many public clouds lack support. Logicworks says infiniCloud offers application monitoring, server patching, firewall security, intrusion detection (IDS), database clustering, PCI, HIPAA and SAS-70 Type II compliance, CDN, load balancing, traffic management and disaster recovery.

• Migration - Logicworks says it can manage cloud capacity planning, migrating existing apps to infiniCloud and integrating infiniCloud with in-house IT. Enterprises that use virtualization can import and export virtual machines to and from Logicworks in both open source cloud and VMware formats. Logicworks engineers can seamlessly move VMs between infiniCloud, in-house IT and other systems at Logicworks like private clouds, dedicated servers and managed database clusters.

Current Logicworks customers are SaaS providers, e-commerce sites and content destinations such as major league baseball, iVillage and Dow Jones Factiva. The company is expecting xBox titles, web sites for broadcast TV networks, online investment and trading services, and digital healthcare applications to sign up for infiniCloud.