To most who practice it, technology is a religion. So it will come as no surprise that one amongst us now claims to have discovered the “true Cloud,” the Cloud beyond simple development, the Cloud that brings us to the nirvana of serious application deployment and production via the cloud.

OpSource, our modern day St. Helena, says the true Cloud, which it’s unveiling as we speak, combines the availability, flexibility and community of the consumer cloud with the more ineffable security, performance and control that the Fortune 1000 demand. Like any viable religion, it has a little something for everybody.

The seven-year-old company, whose financing (including debt financing) tops $67 million, more than enough to pay for any expedition to find the “true Cloud,” has had this “first-of-a-kind” widgetry, singularly called the OpSource Cloud, in private beta and is now revealing it to all and sundry in the expectation of mass conversions that may involve abjuring if not IBM and Amazon – which is now claiming a “true Cloud” of its own – then at least Rackspace once it’s available on October 2.

The company’s had 20 companies beta testing the stuff and 100 are reportedly pre-sold.

OpSource Cloud, which will expand the company’s existing business – already responsible for billions of transactions a day – from SaaS to the enterprise, means to provide every user with a “Virtual Private Cloud” within the public cloud and let them decide how much they want to be connected to the public Internet – anywhere from totally available to shy and totally private.

Since security is key to enterprise adoption cloud computing OpSource is letting the IT department manage its security as it would back home in its internal infrastructure – like using customized firewalls.

Like Amazon started promising the other day, an OpSource Cloud user will get a Virtual Private Network (VPN) backed by a 100% uptime Cisco Layer 2 SLA. Access is through a web-based control panel or APIs.

OpSource says its high-performance multi-tier architecture (difference from the usual flat cloud and with guaranteed latency in between systems and sub-millisecond access time) is set up for user-level logon and passwords, operational permissions and department and sub-departmental reporting. None of your typical single-user, one big user name and password root access malarkey.

It’s using VMware for virtualization and application portability between the cloud and the enterprise. It’s also offering Red Hat and Windows and MySQL as well as EMC and NetApp storage.

Despite all this privacy business, it’s not offering any dedicated hardware.

There’s the usual online sign-up and pay-by-the-hour usage, no commitment, and centralized billing with sub-account budgeting and permissions and reporting.

CEO Treb Ryan (pictured above) said to figure 12 cents-50 cents an hour per single-CPU server, 1GB of memory, a 50GB drive and either Windows or Red Hat.

Unlike Amazon, OpSource is offering 24x7 handholding, ticketing and status tracking and its SLA is better. There’s about the same control over spend.

Initially the virtualized infrastructure OpSource will offer belongs to NTT America, one of its many investors, and is located in Northern Virginia.

Existing OpSource customers include Adobe, Oracle, Symantec, Business Objects, BMC, McAfee, General Mills, ABC and Mattel.