Recently, Verizon announced the launch of Verizon Cloud – our new cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, Verizon Cloud Compute and cloud-based object storage service, Verizon Cloud Storage. Over the last couple of weeks, some of us have attended conferences and meetings with key partners and were faced with some interesting questions. Therefore, we thought we’d take a moment to answer them here.
1. What’s Verizon Cloud?
Verizon Cloud provides predictable performance for compute, networks, and storage, allowing for the provisioning and deployment of virtual machines in minutes and the assignment of predictable performance levels for each machine. This new platform is designed for mission critical applications with consistent and predictable performance. Customers can simply select the performance level they require and only pay for what they need which enables more use-cases and additional applications to be run on the cloud.
2. What will happen to Enterprise Cloud?
The Enterprise Cloud is a proven cloud service and we will continue to support it through advanced features, and updates. This new cloud platform shares the same APIs and many of the same software components as Enterprise Cloud, providing for continuity to our customers. By supporting new features on both platforms, we can get insight into how to focus on our software development and service delivery. We can deliver new features (like monitoring as a service or a patching service) as an added capability for all of our platforms, because the features actually run on the platform and interact with the other services and functions. Our investments in APIs and compose-able services have allowed us to combine capabilities and deliver new features to both Enterprise Cloud and Verizon Cloud without having to duplicate efforts.
3. What’s the main target for Verizon Cloud?
Our goal is to provide easy access to anyone who wants to build, deploy and use applications regardless of the size of their organization. That said, Verizon Cloud is an enterprise-grade solution. First, the cloud environments will be deployed at seven of our top tier data centers. Second, we have built in the capabilities to maintain the availability and reliability of the services. We used a unique hardware architecture to build a strong platform by providing redundant power supplies, multiple connections to the hosts, and the ability to migrate customer workloads between the hosts. This means that the base platform is tolerant of component failures without disrupting customer workloads. It also means we can provide upgrades to the infrastructure (software) by migrating workloads off of the hardware targeted for upgrade. With this, we can provide high availability by reducing or eliminating the most common causes of failure. Finally, we add in security features like isolated networking, protected storage, and DDOS protection capabilities to meet strict enterprise requirements.
4. What components make up Verizon Cloud Compute?
In order to allow users to select the level of performance they need to achieve, we have radically streamlined the architecture that makes up Verizon Cloud using two primary components: chassis and switches. Each chassis is outfitted with 16 Gb Ethernet, 4 terabits of memory and 1024 cores of processing power. These chassis are tied together with a high density thick fabric attachment that runs up to massive connected switches for a total of 160 gigabits of uplink and a flat layer 2 non-loop system.
5. What’s Verizon Cloud Storage?
Verizon Cloud Storage uses erasure coding to reduce the amount of storage required to protect our customers’ data leading to more efficient storage with phenomenal durability. In addition this system has very high performance by utilizing the same infrastructure as Verizon Cloud Compute (the IAAS platform). Verizon Cloud Storage provides a highly secure storage environment as well with optional, automatic encryption of your data.
