Steven Joyce, Minister for Economic Development, today launched New Zealand's first and only fully-automated cloud service, the Catalyst Cloud.

The product of two years of research and development and millions of dollars of investment, the Catalyst Cloud brings full automation and internationally competitive pricing to New Zealand businesses.

With a capacity of 100,000 virtual servers, and the potential to keep more than $40 million a year in New Zealand, the Catalyst Cloud means choice, flexibility and scalability for businesses looking to drive efficiencies and encourage innovation.

The Catalyst Cloud features real time provisioning of virtual machines, network, object and block storage all from a web dashboard. Computing needs grow with business and can be scaled out or in according to demand.

The Catalyst Cloud uses a ‘pay as you go' model that requires no upfront investment, no long-term commitment and offers competitive hourly rates. New Zealand businesses get ‘all the power of the data center, at a price and scale that works for them'.

The Catalyst Cloud is built using commodity hardware and Open source software, which deliver tremendous value for money when compared with branded and proprietary alternatives. The Catalyst Cloud is developed on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform originally written by NASA and Rackspace, and built by the open source technologists at Catalyst.

“With the Catalyst Cloud, we wanted to deliver powerful, flexible compute, network and storage capability at a competitive cost,” says Don Christie, Catalyst director. “Kiwi businesses will get similar functionality as AWS, but with the privacy benefits and no latency that local hosting provides.

Christie says, “The Catalyst Cloud gives people access to scalable, cost-effective infrastructure as a service, hosted here in New Zealand. That is going to drive more productivity and innovation that shipping your data offshore.