Verizon also wants a piece of this burgeoning market, and late last year tossed Verizon Cloud Compute into all this soup.
Verizon knew it couldn’t simply mimic AWS. So instead it is pitching cloud storage to support its IaaS, and aiming the combo at the enterprise. It goes so far as to claim that its IaaS fundamentally changes what enterprises can do with the public cloud, offering unprecedented performance and security. Verizon hopes it cloud is so robust that large shops will shift their private cloud installs to the Verizon cloud.
Part of the performance comes from teaming with AMD. The idea is that inexpensive AMD servers will make the Verizon cost effective. It isn’t just that AMD processing is cheap, but more that these processors are miserly when it comes to power use – and that’s where the real savings lie.
The server tech behind Verizon’s cloud consists of AMD machines boasting hundreds of cores, all stitched together into on monstrous utility. With this kind of power, Verizon is confident it can stand behind market leading SLAs.
“We reinvented the public cloud from the ground up to specifically address the needs of our enterprise clients,” said John Considine, chief technology officer at Verizon Terremark. “We wanted to give them back control of their infrastructure — providing the speed and flexibility of a generic public cloud with the performance and security they expect from an enterprise-grade cloud. Our collaboration with AMD enabled us to develop revolutionary technology, and it represents the backbone of our future plans.”
Verizon Terremark has a least one analyst in its corner. “The rapid, reliable and scalable delivery of cloud compute and storage services is the key to competing successfully in any cloud market from infrastructure, to platform, to application; and enterprises are constantly asking for more as they alter their business models to thrive in a mobile and analytic world,” said Richard Villars, vice president, Datacenter & Cloud at IDC. “Next generation integrated IT solutions like AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 provide a flexible yet high-performance platform upon which companies like Verizon can use to build the next generation of cloud service offerings.”
AMD, as expected, is bullish on the Verizon Terramark cloud.
“Verizon has a clear vision for the future of the public cloud services — services that are more flexible, more reliable and guaranteed,” said Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager, Server, AMD. “The technology we developed turns the cloud paradigm upside down by creating a service that an enterprise can configure and control as if the equipment were in its own data center. With this innovation in cloud services, I expect enterprises to migrate their core IT services and mission critical applications to Verizon’s cloud services.
