The Catalyst Cloud, New Zealand's first fully automated, on-demand cloud solution has had a very successful launch, with use of its compute and storage services increasing by an average of 500% per month over its first four months in operation.

This enthusiastic adoption of the Catalyst Cloud by public and private sector organisations has enabled Catalyst to continue to develop the service and further enhance the cloud. As a result, we are happy to announce new services, an additional region and a price reduction for on-demand compute instances.

VPN-as-a-Service is now available in beta on the Catalyst Cloud for NZD $0.017 per hour or NZD $13 per month. The service allows customers to interconnect their existing data centres and office networks with the Catalyst Cloud, using a secure encrypted tunnel.

This is the first of several planned new services. Catalyst will introduce Load Balancing and Cloud Orchestration in the coming months, with Database, Message Queue and Drupal as services to follow.

Later this month, Catalyst is opening a data centre in Porirua with six times the capacity of its Wellington data centre. Besides boosting the capacity of the Catalyst Cloud, the geographic redundancy of multiple regions will enable Catalyst's customers to use one of them as a Disaster Recovery site.

From 1 September 2014, the prices for on-demand compute instances will decrease by between 10-40%, depending on the type. Our new prices are shown here.

In addition to great prices and extensive functionality, Catalyst's New Zealand owned and hosted service also offers the advantages of reduced latency and confidence about data sovereignty.

The Catalyst Cloud is a fully API-driven infrastructure, developed on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform originally built by NASA and Rackspace.