Verizon Unveils New Cloud Strategy

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No stranger to cloud computing, Verizon is recalibrating its approach in a bid to bring businesses of all sizes on board.

“Verizon created the enterprise cloud, now we’re recreating it,” said John Stratton, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions in company remarks. Verizon Cloud was “built from the bottom up” based on feedback from his company’s enterprise customers, he reported. The result, according to Verizon, is an enterprise-friendly cloud platform that also accommodates the IT needs of small and midsized businesses (SMBs).

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The company’s new Verizon Cloud offering, which is comprised of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform (Verizon Cloud Compute) and object storage (Verizon Cloud Storage), “is a fundamentally different cloud,” asserted David Small, chief platform officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, in a company blog post. The product “was built to provide the agility and economic benefit of a generic public cloud, while maintaining the reliability, scale and performance enterprises have come to expect from Verizon,” he continued.

Verizon made a big move to establish itself as a cloud contender in early 2011 with the $1.4 billion acquisition of Terremark, an IT services provider and data center operator. At the time, Lowell McAdam, president and COO of Verizon, said that the deal “will accelerate Verizon’s everything-as-a-service cloud strategy by delivering a powerful portfolio of highly secure, scalable, on-demand solutions to business and government customers across the globe.”

Fast forward two years and Verizon is again diving into the business cloud market — but with a new approach.

In devising the “next generation of cloud computing,” Small stated that his “team questioned everything that had been done in the past and challenged all assumptions about the cloud.” Suggesting that they architected a public cloud that can handle demanding business workloads, he described Verizon Cloud as “the best of both worlds – the speed and flexibility of a public cloud, equipped with the proven performance and control of an enterprise-class service.”

Verizon Cloud Compute enabled customers to create and deploy virtual machines (VMs) “in just seconds,” according to Verizon. It provides fine-grained controls to set virtual machine, network and storage performance as well as link storage to multiple VMs.

Each Verizon Cloud location supports millions of VMs, claims the company. Currently, Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage are up and running in seven Verizon cloud data center facilities, including Culpeper, Va., Englewood, Colo., Miami, Santa Clara, Calif., Amsterdam, London and Sao Paolo. To start, the Culpeper data center will be used to service customers. Other locations will follow suit through mid-2014, said Verizon.

Aimed at cloud-based applications, the multitenant Verizon Cloud Storage platform is object-based and optimized for low-latency transfers of data. “Verizon Cloud Storage overcomes latency issues that have plagued many traditional storage offerings, providing improved performance,” noted the company.

Further, it provides IT managers with granular management options, indicated John Considine, chief technology officer of Verizon Terremark. “We are putting control and choice back in the hands of the user, while still addressing their needs for availability, performance and security,” he said in a statement.

The Verizon Cloud public beta will kick off in the fourth quarter. Beta invites can be requested here.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.