Verizon Plays Catch Up with Cloud Computing, Storage Offerings

A leader such as Amazon, which sat with appropriate services (e.g. AWS or S3) in time standards in the cloud, is constantly under attack. Google entered the cloud business with Google Compute Engine and then Microsoft is aggressively highlighting its Azure cloud platform.

A new cloud offering is now provided by the US telecom giant Verizon. The company has started offering cloud service in the name Verizon Cloud that provides companies with the best performance, and unprecedented control for flexible and rapid deployment.

With new platform IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and storage service in the cloud, Verizon is radically changing the way public clouds are built. Instead of choosing from pre-set configurations of virtual machines, Verizon Cloud customers can request a specific amount of computation, memory, and storage capacity.

Unlike existing Verizon Enterprise Cloud, which is based on VMware virtualization, this new offering is built with proprietary technology – most of which comes from Terremark, a cloud technology company acquired by Verizon in 2011. Verizon has also acquired a company called CloudSwitch in 2011, which helped Verizon integrate multi-hypervisor support in its new cloud service. Currently, Verizon Cloud supports only its API eCloud custom, but the company plans to integrate CloudStack and Amazon Web Services compatibility down the line.

Verizon Cloud is backed by the company’s global data centers to the cloud, global IP network and managed security services to enterprise level, which Verizon entitlements no other player in the market has this combination of services and features.

Next Generation Cloud Offering

Gavan Egan, who runs the cloud business for Verizon in Europe, said Verizon today offers a whole range of cloud and hybrid cloud options – public cloud, private cloud, co-location with 15 data centers around the world.

“Verizon bought Terremark nearly three years ago. Verizon had an offering which it had deployed in data centers around the world, and which was very successful in the enterprise space. These were complemented by the acquisitions of Terremark and Cloudswitch,” Egan said.

Verizon also wants to improve cloud manageability by providing customize choice of compute, memory, stores and also in terms of network. “We will allow you to set up your workloads on our cloud and then dial the number of IOs you need for that application. Dial up the size of the network you need for that. You dial it up and we will guarantee that you will have access to those resources for the whole time. And you know what, if you don’t need them, you just dial them back down”.

Large corporations, medium-sized businesses and small developer shops will have equal benefit. On the one hand, they would get the agility and economic benefits of a generic public cloud, on the other hand they would get the reliability and extent of the services to enterprise-level with unprecedented performance control.

Verizon Cloud Storage

The amount of corporate data grows exponentially and companies are looking for better ways to store and retrieve. Verizon responds to this urgent need by introducing Verizon Cloud Storage, a new offering of cloud-based services, and a range of complementary services and data-retention IT consulting.

Designed to cope with the complexity of secure data, the Verizon Cloud Storage provides a flexible solution for managing and retrieving data over the Internet. This service, offered on a pay-as-you-go, is scalable to meet changing business requirements and can enhance the traditional storage options, such as ‘storage area networking’ and ‘network-attached storage’, or be used as a stand-alone solution.

Key features include high levels of logical and physical security such as, for example, a multitenant secure file system and data transfers are encrypted. The new service provides several methods for accessing stored data, including software, application programming interfaces and third-party applications, and provides companies with the ability to choose where to store the data.

With this new service to the public cloud, the telecom giant is entering the market years behind competitors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But Verizon Cloud offers the most advanced emission control than any other cloud solution, the company claims. The company has developed the software to specifically address the need for businesses to have greater flexibility and control with regard to the provisioning of virtual machines, performance guarantees and security.

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