Category Archives: Infrastructure as a Service

Ajay Chitkara, AWS, Bharti Airtel, Bikram singh Bedi, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud

Bharti Airtel joins AWS Partner Network service to bolster cloud connectivity

Bharti Airtel will offer enterprise customers private links directly to AWS' cloud

Bharti Airtel will offer enterprise customers private links directly to AWS’ cloud

Bharti Airtel has joined Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Partner Network in a move that will see the Indian telco offer private network services for enterprise customers using the AWS cloud.

Airtel said the move would help enterprise customers across the globe leverage AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection between customers’ premises and Amazon’s datacentres globally, and potentially reduce network costs and offer more consistent network performance.

AWS Direct Connect allows enterprise customers to establish a dedicated network connection between their network and any AWS Direct Connect locations using 802.1q VLANs.

“Today, we are seeing more and more organizations embrace the benefits of hybrid network architectures and on-premise environments across the globe. In line with this market adoption, we are excited to strengthen Airtel’s cloud services portfolio by adding AWS to our growing list of cloud services providers,” said Ajay Chitkara, chief executive officer – global business, Bharti Airtel.

“We are confident that this will help our global customers truly leverage the benefits of cloud, and further Airtel’s long-term commitment towards delivering the best technological capabilities for its customers,” Chitkara added.

In canned remarks, Bikram singh Bedi, head of Amazon Web Services India said: “We are excited to be working with Airtel to bring the security and reliability of AWS Direct Connect to Amazon Web Services customers across India. By utilizing AWS Direct Connect, AWS customers are able to reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput and provide a more consistent network experience, helping Indian businesses of all sizes to rapidly expand their organisations.”

A number of large telcos have partnered with AWS in a bid to bolster their appeal to their own enterprise customers, and attract large multinational firms – which tend to have a strong interest in harmonising their IT estates globally.

Ajay Chitkara, AWS, Bharti Airtel, Bikram singh Bedi, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud

Bharti Airtel joins AWS Partner Network service to bolster cloud connectivity

Bharti Airtel will offer enterprise customers private links directly to AWS' cloud

Bharti Airtel will offer enterprise customers private links directly to AWS’ cloud

Bharti Airtel has joined Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Partner Network in a move that will see the Indian telco offer private network services for enterprise customers using the AWS cloud.

Airtel said the move would help enterprise customers across the globe leverage AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection between customers’ premises and Amazon’s datacentres globally, and potentially reduce network costs and offer more consistent network performance.

AWS Direct Connect allows enterprise customers to establish a dedicated network connection between their network and any AWS Direct Connect locations using 802.1q VLANs.

“Today, we are seeing more and more organizations embrace the benefits of hybrid network architectures and on-premise environments across the globe. In line with this market adoption, we are excited to strengthen Airtel’s cloud services portfolio by adding AWS to our growing list of cloud services providers,” said Ajay Chitkara, chief executive officer – global business, Bharti Airtel.

“We are confident that this will help our global customers truly leverage the benefits of cloud, and further Airtel’s long-term commitment towards delivering the best technological capabilities for its customers,” Chitkara added.

In canned remarks, Bikram singh Bedi, head of Amazon Web Services India said: “We are excited to be working with Airtel to bring the security and reliability of AWS Direct Connect to Amazon Web Services customers across India. By utilizing AWS Direct Connect, AWS customers are able to reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput and provide a more consistent network experience, helping Indian businesses of all sizes to rapidly expand their organisations.”

A number of large telcos have partnered with AWS in a bid to bolster their appeal to their own enterprise customers, and attract large multinational firms – which tend to have a strong interest in harmonising their IT estates globally.

Anthony Yeh, containers, Database, Google, Infrastructure as a Service, MySQL, News & Analysis, Open Source, YouTube

YouTube brings Vitess MySQL scaling magic to Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate a beefed up version of MySQL with Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate a beefed up version of MySQL with Kubernetes

YouTube is working to integrate Vitess, which improves the ability of MySQL databases to scale in containerised environments, with Kubernetes, an open source container deployment and management tool.

Vitess, which is available as an open source project and pitched as a high-concurrency alternative to NoSQL and vanilla MySQL databases, uses a BSON-based protocol which creates very lightweight connections (around 32KB), and its pooling feature uses Go’s concurrency support to map these lightweight connections to a small pool of MySQL connections; Vitess can handle thousands of connections.

It also handles horizontal and vertical sharding, and can dynamically re-write queries that could impede the database performance.

Anthony Yeh, a software engineer at YouTube said the company is currently using the service to handle metadata for the company’s video service, which handles billions of daily video views and 300 hours of new video uploads per minute.

“Your new website is growing exponentially. After a few rounds of high fives, you start scaling to meet this unexpected demand. While you can always add more front-end servers, eventually your database becomes a bottleneck.”

“Vitess is available as an open source project and runs best in a containerized environment. With Kubernetes and Google Container Engine as your container cluster manager, it’s now a lot easier to get started. We’ve created a single deployment configuration for Vitess that works on any platform that Kubernetes supports,” he explained in a blog post on the Google Cloud Platform website. “In this environment, Vitess provides a MySQL storage layer with improved durability, scalability, and manageability.”

Yeh said the company is just getting started with the Kubernetes integration, but once users will be able to deploy Vitess in containers with Kubernetes on any cloud platform supported by it.

Cloudwatt, France, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Numergy, Orange

Orange confirms Cloudwatt acquisition

Orange has confirmed it will acquire Cloudwatt

Orange has confirmed it will acquire Cloudwatt

Orange confirmed this week that the company has finalised an agreement to acquire all remaining shares of Cloudwatt, the cloud services provider it set up with the French government.

In January the company confirmed it had entered into discussions to buy the firm, in which Orange had the largest stake; Thales owned 22 per cent and Caisse des Dépôts 33 per cent of Cloudwatt.

“By acquiring Cloudwatt, Orange will strengthen its enterprise cloud services offering – a major focus of its “Essentials2020″ strategic plan,” Orange said in a statement.

“The technologies and services offered by Cloudwatt complement Orange’s own portfolio and represent an opportunity to accelerate the deployment of a sovereign public cloud both in France and in Europe.”

Through Caisse des Dépôts, the French state paid €75m for its share of Cloudwatt and spent another €75m to help set up Numergy (co-founded by SFR and Bull) through the French government’s ‘Project Andromeda’ in a bid to provide locally-hosted competition to US-based cloud service providers.

Reports earlier this year suggested a potential merger between Numergy and Cloudwatt was in the works in late 2014, however, now that Atos owns Bull and Numericable owns SFR, it’s thought a potential deal would have been too awkward for shareholders to accept.

The acquisition will see Orange integrate all of Cloudwatt’s employee into its operations (likely the company’s Business Services division).

Asia Pacific, Datacentre, Equiniix, Fujitsu, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Singapore

Fujitsu partners with Equinix on Singapore cloud datacentre

Fujistu has opened its third cloud datacentre in Singapore this week

Fujistu opened its third cloud datacentre in Singapore

Fujitsu has set up another datacentre in Singapore this week amidst what it sees as increasing demand for cloud services in Singapore and neighbouring countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

The datacentre, hosted in Equinix’s western Singapore facility, will host Fujitsu’s portfolio of cloudservices and offer a number of new connectivity features “currently under development” that would allow enterprises to federate with other cloud platforms.

The recently announced datacentre is Fujitsu’s third in Singapore, and it already operates over 100 worldwide; the company’s cloud services are hosted from six datacentres globally.

The company said it chose to add another datacentre in Singapore because of its strategic location and attractiveness to large multinational firms.

“In recent years, companies increasingly are embracing cloud services as a platform to support the accelerating pace of business in Asia. In particular, because of its low level of natural disaster related risk and its position as an international network hub with reliable broadband network lines, Singapore is often chosen as the location for integrated systems operations by many companies that are pursuing multinational business expansion,” the company said in a statement.

Fujitsu is the latest cloud vendor to view Singapore as a relatively untapped market for cloud services. This week CenturyLink, which recently expanded its managed services presence in China, added public cloud nodes to one of its Singapore datacentres.

Apart from locally established multinationals and the booming financial services sector, the Singapore Government has also shown itself to be looking to invest more in both using cloud services and growing usage of cloud platforms in the region.

According to Parallels, local SMBs are also hopping onto cloud platforms with reasonable pace. The firm believes the SMB cloud services market in Singapore is projected to hit $916M in 2017, with a three-year CAGR of 21 per cent.

Enterprise IT, Europe, Ian Pulsford, Infrastructure as a Service, Jeff Cotten, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Rackspace, The Entertainer

Toy retailer The Entertainer taps Rackspace for managed private cloud

The Entertainer has moved onto Rackspace's managed private cloud platform

The Entertainer has moved onto Rackspace’s managed private cloud platform

UK toy retailer The Entertainer has moved onto Rackspace’s managed private cloud platform in a bid to improve how the company’s site and databases handle traffic spikes.

Working with omni-channel retail consultancy Conexus, The Entertainer sought to enhance its website and databases in a bid to cope with rising seasonal demand.

The company, which has about 100 stores in the UK, said in the five weeks leading up to last Christmas last year it saw a 60 per cent sales increase from the same period in 2013 (it generates half of its annual revenues between November and December).

“In addition to the scalability that’s available through the Rackspace Private Cloud, the high performance it offers is also very important to us. It has allowed the business to deploy a Click and Collect service, which has improved the customer experience and boosted sales,” said Ian Pulsford, head of IT services, The Entertainer.

“A crucial aspect of Click and Collect is having an effective stock management system, which we also power by the cloud. Every evening between midnight and 4 a.m. we monitor the stock available in each store, collecting data on our 17,000 products. This ensures that the availability we offer our Click and Collect customers is accurate and updated in real time,” Pulsford said.

“However, as we’ve learned in the past with previous hosting providers, the technology alone is not enough if we don’t have access to a high level of support and expertise to keep it running smoothly,” he added.

Jeff Cotten, managing director of Rackspace International said: “Multi-channel retailing is highly competitive, which means both the in-store and online experiences have to be excellent to keep customers coming back. It’s been great working with The Entertainer and Conexus to build a Private Cloud environment that is high performing and highly scalable, so The Entertainer can focus on developing new services and increasing its presence across a growing number of ecommerce channels.”

ARM, Datacentre, HP Moohshot, Infrastructure as a Service, Matt Jarvis, News & Analysis, server

DataCentred adds ARM 64-bit to OpenStack cloud

DataCentred is adding ARM-based OpenStack services to its public cloud portfolio

DataCentred is adding ARM-based OpenStack services to its public cloud portfolio

Manchester-based cloud services provider DataCentred has added ARM AArch64-based servers to its OpenStack-based public cloud platform, a product of its recently announced partnership with Codethink. The company’s head of cloud services told BCN the company is responding to customer demand for putting ARM-based workloads in the cloud.

As part of the move the ARM AArch64 architecture, which allows 32-bit and 64-bit processes to be executed alongside one another, will be added to the company’s OpenStack-based public cloud offering; the company said it will run the platform on HP M400 ARM hardware, and give customers access to Intel and ARM architectures alongside one another within an OpenStack environment.

DataCentrerd said the move will help drive down the cost of data centre operation and of the cost of virtualised instances within a customer’s service framework.

“We are thrilled to be the first OpenStack public cloud operator to feature 64-bit ARM instances. This breakthrough is testament to the considerable skill and expertise of our OpenStack cloud development team.  This is probably the first example of Moonshot AArch64 running in Europe outside of HP’s development labs, and certainly the first example of generally available Moonshot backed AArch64 instances in an OpenStack public cloud anywhere in the world,” said Mike Kelly, chief executive and founder of DataCentred.

“We know that ARM themselves are pleased to hear of this development, as a real world deployment. OpenStack is one of the big success stories for Open Source software, and is likely to be the environment through which enterprise migrates, in a vendor neutral way, to take advantage of elastic cloud compute,” Kelly added.

Matt Jarvis, head of cloud computing at DataCentred told BCN there’s currently a scarcity of ARM in the cloud.

“This deployment is driven by customer demand – we have both new customers who want to access ARM64 on-demand, and existing customers who we’ve been talking to about proof of concept ARM workloads for some time,” Jarvis said.

“There is significant interest from the worldwide community of technology companies currently working with ARM hardware to have access to develop platforms on-demand, along with specific vertical market interest in ARM as part of a longer term technical strategy targeting reduction in operating cost due to power savings,” he added.

ARM for compute seems to be fairly scarce in the cloud world, though it’s clear that OpenStack incumbents are looking to bring the software platform to all kinds of architecture beyond x86. Oracle is looking to marry SPARC and OpenStack while IBM and Rackspace are both working towards getting the open source software platform working on OpenPower.

DataCentred said it plans to move the Moonshot-powered cloud service into production sometime later this year.

Aamzon, AWS, Consulting, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Software AG, Terry Wise, Vendor, Wolfram Jost

Software AG migrates cloud portfolio to AWS

Software AG plans to deploy its software portfolio on the AWS platform and offer cloud migration services to enterprises

Software AG plans to deploy its software portfolio on the AWS platform and offer cloud migration services to enterprises

Software AG is moving forward with plans to offer cloud migration services to enterprise clients in a move that will see the company deploy its cloud software portfolio onto Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

The company said it has made a “strategic decision” to deploy its entire cloud portfolio on the AWS cloud over the course of 2015, with its Alfabet Cloud and ARIS Cloud suites already running on Amazon’s cloud platform.

t also plans to offer services that help enterprises determine whether and how to move to the cloud while considering ease of access, cost, regulatory, security and business processes transformation issues involved with such a move.

“Software AG is committed to increasing customer choice and ease of use wherever possible and transformation to the cloud is a significant step in this direction, delivering increased enterprise flexibility and adaptability”, said Wolfram Jost, chief technology officer at Software AG. “Not only does this help enterprises and government departments to design and implement individual cloud strategies and architectures, it does so from the cloud, delivering cost efficiencies from the start.”

The company said its focus for 2015 will be on “delivering strategic cloud adoption consulting services,” an area where a good number of boutique consultancies have emerged over the past few years.

Terry Wise, vice president of AWS also commented on the partnership: “Today, more than ever before, leading ISVs are looking for IT solutions that allow them to move quickly, reduce costs, and better serve their customers. Software AG is a leading example of an innovative software vendor going all in on AWS to leverage our secure, robust infrastructure platform, and expanding global footprint to build highly differentiated, value-added solutions for their customers.”

Asia Pacific, Citic Telecom, desktop as a service, Horizon, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud, VMware

Citic Telecom taps VMwarre for desktop as a service

Citic Telecom is using VMware Horizon to stand up its desktop as a service offering

Citic Telecom is using VMware Horizon to stand up its desktop as a service offering

Hong Kong-based telco Citic Telecom CPC has launched a desktop as a service offering based on VMware Horizon, which the company claims is the first of its kind in the region.

The company said the virtual desktop solution will be aimed at enterprises in the Asia Pacific region that operate in multiple locations but don’t necessarily have the resources to stand up their infrastructure.

“Many enterprises in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region are employing a bigger mobile workforce, and more and more are running on a multi-office model. However, the technical infrastructure of these enterprises is not able to support the dynamic requirements in everyday operations,” said Mr. Daniel Kwong, Senior vice president of information technology and security services at Citic Telecom.

The move is part of a broader effort to strengthen the telco’s reach in the regional IT services, particularly in Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China. To strengthen its cloud offerings the company launched its first cloud datacentre in Shanghai last year, and it also plans to open two more cloud datacentres in Beijing and Guangzhou in late 2015.

It will also give the virtualisation incumbent a boost in the region. Last year VMware expanded its cloud services in Asia in partnership with China Telecom in China and SoftBank in Japan.

Danny Tam, general manager of VMware Hong Kong, said: “The mobile cloud is transforming how enterprises should operate, and this is the core of what we do. Our collaboration with Citic Telecom CPC will open the door to more enterprises in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region, given Citic Telecom CPC’s extensive network and the credibility that both VMware and Citic Telecom CPC have in the market.”