(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Worldwide communications provider AT&T (www.att.com) has unveiled its latest cloud-based service, AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service (synaptic.att.com), designed to give companies of all sizes simple on-demand access to scalable computing capacity to address their dynamic needs.
Using technology from VMware (www.vmware.com) and Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), according to its Monday announcement, AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service provides a self-service cloud for delivering IT solutions reliably over AT&T’s highly secure network. It can be used to quickly address demands for variable computing processing power and expand capacity to scale with their business requirements. AT&T also provides network, server, hardware and storage management capabilities.
“As companies increasingly move to cloud-based environments, AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service provides a much-needed choice for IT executives who worry about over-building or under-investing in the capacity needed to handle their users’ traffic demands,” AT&T Business Solutions strategy and application services senior vice president Roman Pacewicz said in a statement.
VMware president and chief executive officer Paul Maritz said AT&T’s unique strengths in global network capabilities will help customers extend their internal IT environments to the cloud. “We are excited to contribute our technology to enable this and to work with AT&T in our VMware vCloud initiative that is focused on integrating and connecting private and public clouds, using the VMware vSphere virtualization platform and the VMware vCloud API,” Maritz said in a statement.
AT&T is also working closely with Sun Microsystems to use the Sun Cloud Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud APIs, cloud reference architecture and design expertise to create an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services. The partnership helps Sun deliver cost-effective, open and interoperable clouds, according to Sun cloud computing senior vice president Dave Douglas.
“AT&T’s network and operational excellence coupled with Sun’s Open Cloud Platform and Sun Cloud APIs delivers a revolutionary cloud offering,” Douglas said in a statement. “We’re excited to be working with AT&T to bring an enterprise-class, highly scalable offering that delivers choice and flexibility to market.”
AT&T will deploy the service in the US in the fourth quarter of 2009, and making it accessible by customers connecting to the web anywhere. In the future, AT&T plans to add the service to select global IDCs to meet customer demand internationally.
While AT&T did not reveal pricing, it has outlined the plans, which come in three flavors, small (with 1 CPU and 4 GB of memory), medium (2 CPUs and 8 GB), and large (4 CPUs and 16 GB). Each plan includes 100 GB of storage, and up to 2 TB of additional storage is available for purchase.
