21 hours ago Oct. 3, 2013 - 7:43 AM PDT
Verizon isn’t the first name that comes to mind when you think of enterprise cloud, but it’s fielded respectable, mostly VMware-based cloud services for some time. Now it’s shaking things up a bit with a new enterprise cloud based on optimized Xen hypervisors and which borrows heavily from CloudStack. (Verizon cautioned against saying it is based on CloudStack. Hmmm.)
John Considine, Verizon’s CTO wants you to know that the company spent 5 years researching cloud and built this new Verizon Cloud offering from the ground up. “We used Xen hypervisor as baseline and enhanced that to allow higher performance and have more control over performance and enhanced it to run different VM formats natively,” he said in an interview.
“If you now use VMware in the enterprise and want to move workloads or use the same golden image and tools and drivers … you can’t quite do that in Amazon which dictates the kernels and drivers you use. We enhanced the hypervisor to support VMware drivers and toolsets,” he said.’
[h=2]Can Verizon Cloud compete with Amazon and the biggest boys?[/h]That would be a big deal if it works as advertised. Most enterprises now rely heavily on VMware in-house and want a way to move some of at workloads to the cloud. Such “seamlessness” of migration is one of the key sales pitches for VMware’s new vCloud Hybrid Services public cloud, for example, Verizon will be competing for those same customers.
The Verizon Cloud will let enterprises dial up (or down) and pay for performance requirements depending on VMs, storage, network as needed, CTO John Considine said in an interview.
“We offer reserved performance — for every VM, you can set the performance level. Or you can say I want this NIC to run at this speed or i want disk to run at 100 or 1,000 IOPS, you can do that,” he said. ”The whole notion of the noisy neighbor is off the table.”
That ”noisy neighbor” syndrome occurs in shared multi-tenant infrastructure when someone else on the same virtual machine hogs resources hurting the performance of your workload.
Considine announced the public beta of Verizon Cloud on Thursday at Interop. A private beta has been running since December 2012.Much of the heavy lifting for this cloud comes out of Cloudswitch, a Burlington, Mass. company Verizon bought two years ago.
[h=2]A long road ahead[/h]The jury is out whether Verizon will soon be counted in the top tier of cloud providers. While it does have some of the enterprise customers AWS craves, it does not have the same huge brand recognition. If the CIO of a major company thinks “cloud” he or she will think AWS way before Verizon.
GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum said the current Verizon/Terremark cloud hasn’t set the world on fire, but it does offer sound options. And, Terremark itself has a good reputation in government accounts — and that arena is becoming hotly contested as AWS and Google create government-specific clouds.
This is clearly an ambitious undertaking and some analysts gave Verizon props for doing its homework.”Please God, nobody start calling it ‘cloud 2.0
Verizon isn’t the first name that comes to mind when you think of enterprise cloud, but it’s fielded respectable, mostly VMware-based cloud services for some time. Now it’s shaking things up a bit with a new enterprise cloud based on optimized Xen hypervisors and which borrows heavily from CloudStack. (Verizon cautioned against saying it is based on CloudStack. Hmmm.)
John Considine, Verizon’s CTO wants you to know that the company spent 5 years researching cloud and built this new Verizon Cloud offering from the ground up. “We used Xen hypervisor as baseline and enhanced that to allow higher performance and have more control over performance and enhanced it to run different VM formats natively,” he said in an interview.
“If you now use VMware in the enterprise and want to move workloads or use the same golden image and tools and drivers … you can’t quite do that in Amazon which dictates the kernels and drivers you use. We enhanced the hypervisor to support VMware drivers and toolsets,” he said.’
[h=2]Can Verizon Cloud compete with Amazon and the biggest boys?[/h]That would be a big deal if it works as advertised. Most enterprises now rely heavily on VMware in-house and want a way to move some of at workloads to the cloud. Such “seamlessness” of migration is one of the key sales pitches for VMware’s new vCloud Hybrid Services public cloud, for example, Verizon will be competing for those same customers.
The Verizon Cloud will let enterprises dial up (or down) and pay for performance requirements depending on VMs, storage, network as needed, CTO John Considine said in an interview.
“We offer reserved performance — for every VM, you can set the performance level. Or you can say I want this NIC to run at this speed or i want disk to run at 100 or 1,000 IOPS, you can do that,” he said. ”The whole notion of the noisy neighbor is off the table.”
That ”noisy neighbor” syndrome occurs in shared multi-tenant infrastructure when someone else on the same virtual machine hogs resources hurting the performance of your workload.
Considine announced the public beta of Verizon Cloud on Thursday at Interop. A private beta has been running since December 2012.Much of the heavy lifting for this cloud comes out of Cloudswitch, a Burlington, Mass. company Verizon bought two years ago.
[h=2]A long road ahead[/h]The jury is out whether Verizon will soon be counted in the top tier of cloud providers. While it does have some of the enterprise customers AWS craves, it does not have the same huge brand recognition. If the CIO of a major company thinks “cloud” he or she will think AWS way before Verizon.
GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum said the current Verizon/Terremark cloud hasn’t set the world on fire, but it does offer sound options. And, Terremark itself has a good reputation in government accounts — and that arena is becoming hotly contested as AWS and Google create government-specific clouds.
This is clearly an ambitious undertaking and some analysts gave Verizon props for doing its homework.”Please God, nobody start calling it ‘cloud 2.0