Services outfit, Bulletproof Networks, will launch what it claims is Australia's first fully managed dedicated Virtual Machine (VM) hosting service next month.

General manager, Lorenzo Modesto, said the service was aimed at making it easier for developers and customers to access technology upgrades, manage hardware and deploy new applications.

"This type of service will make it much easier for us, customers and developers because it saves us going constantly backwards and forwards to a data centre installing physical boxes," he said. "Up until now customers needed a staging environment. The benefit of virtualisation technology, specifically for developers, is that we can generate a clone of the production environment and they can then develop it from there."

The Dedicated VM Hosting service runs on enterprise-grade Sun Microsystems hardware and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. It starts from $290 a month and is broken into two categories: Standard Dedicated VM Hosting and Enterprise Dedicated VM Hosting.

The Standard hosting service provides a fully managed, monitored and secure operating system. It allows users to manage their own Web and application servers. The Enterprise version also offers access to trained engineers, larger storage and memory capacity along with troubleshooting and application management.

"We have experienced a lot of demand for this type of service," Modesto said. "It saves customer's money and far outstrips the existing, old-fashioned models of dedicated hosting."