Optus outs details for new cloud service
Optus' business division and its subsidiary Alphawest today announced the launch of a new scalable commercial enterprise "cloud" service, Optus Cloud Solutions, which will be available to enterprise customers from 1 October.
"Services are delivered via the Optus Evolve network and our secure datacentre facilities, giving businesses the added assurance that their data is in good hands," said Rob Parcell, acting managing director, Optus Business.
The infrastructure-as-a-service offering will be delivered through Optus' "Evolve" IP network. Optus Business is in partnership with the joint VMware, Cisco and EMC technology platform to provide the new product.
The telecommunications giant will provide the services in "slices". A typical slice would be 0.5GHz and 1GB RAM at $125 a month. Two price tiers will be on offer for storage, a high performance computing tier and a lower scale computing "economy" tier, at 60¢ per gigabyte per month and 30¢ respectively.
Other requirements such as operating licences and firewalls will incur additional costs. Optus was, however, not able to comment on the details of the pricing structure for firewall and operating system (OS) services. Clients will be able to use their own OS of choice and customers who wish to let Optus take care of OS services will be restricted to Microsoft Windows.
The service is scalable and customers' administrators will be able to scale it up and down as they see fit through Optus' self-service portal. The portal will allow administrators to create, manage and use virtual machines, catalogues, users and groups.
"Optus Cloud Solutions has been designed to give customers the flexibility, agility and control to scale their IT services up and down in real time to support business requirements and fluctuations, without having to maintain their own infrastructure," said Parcell. Service desk support will be on hand 24/7; change and service management reports will also be available.
Optus' cloud services beta was launched in the second week of February this year. Among the handful of enterprise customers to trial the service was Perth-based Curtin University of Technology and property services company Savills.
Curtin initially had some concerns that Optus' Sydney-based datacentre would cause noticeable latency; however, it was found that during the months' long trial that this was not the case: latency was fair below the mark expected. As well as Curtin community benefits, the Optus Cloud Computing Solution is used at the university to support a major astronomy research project.
"Researchers like to have the flexibility to manage their IT requirements based on a switch-on, switch-off basis. We see a real opportunity to provision bespoke environments for researchers so they can access computing on demand. This model could also be potentially extended to students as we progress along the cloud journey," said Peter Nikoletatos, CIO of Curtin University of Technology.
Parcell said that Optus didn't have any future plans to release the services to the consumer market.
Updated at 5:31pm, 16 September 2010: the pricing information was clarified