Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications opened a new front in its effort to build a global cloud presence. The company yesterday announced the imminent launch of a new Enterprise Cloud service that incorporates OpenFlow network virtualization technology.
It’s an IaaS offering that allows customers to manage and optimize ICT assets across a global corporate environment. The OpenFlow-based network virtualization capabilities will help automate network provisioning between the data centers that make up NTT’s cloud assets.
OpenFlow is one of the main arms of the Software Defined Networking movement, which aims to bring greater automation to network configuration in a standardized way.
For substantial cloud deployments, it is becoming increasingly clear that such technologies are necessary to scale the network to match the cloud. After all, you can build a complex, robust, and powerful cloud infrastructure that will revolutionize your business but if you have to configure every internal and external switch and router manually before your users can access it, it wouldn’t be quite as revolutionary would it.
NTT’s Enterprise Cloud service will be launched initially in the company’s main data centers in Japan and Hong Kong on June 29, to be followed by locations in the US, UK, and Singapore by the end of the year and then Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand by March of 2013.
NTT is also out there adding additional assets to bolster their global presence. Last week they announced the acquisition of Gyron, which operates 3MW of data center space in the UK with another 16MW under construction.
This article was authored by Rob Powell and was originally posted on Telecomramblings.com
Rob Powell is founder & editor of Telecom Ramblings, which was set up in 2008. The website is dedicated to discussing trends and developments in the telecom industry.