Paranormal Meets Verizon's Cloud Computing Service

I was speaking yesterday with Verizon about its new hosted data center service, Computing as a Service (CaaS), and flashed back to those spoon bending parties of the ‘70s. Back then stage psychic Uri Geller inspired normally sane people across the country to try to imitate his self-proclaimed paranormal ability to bend spoons and keys.

As a kid at the time, I had gotten to be really good and bending my parent’s patience and figured bending spoons couldn’t be that much more difficult. So I grabbed some of my mother's good silverware, cooped myself up in a dark room, and tried channeling my inner energy (or was it demons?) down my fingertips into the spoon. In the end, I found a much simpler way to bend my mother’s spoons -- a nice strong whack of a hammer. Needless to say she thought a whack somewhere else was more appropriate.

Verizon’s CaaS works its own metal-bending magic, but one that provides real value to anyone interested in outsourcing their data infrastructure. CaaS lets IT move and reprovision physical servers much as they do physical ones. The trick isn’t psychic power and certainly not hammer-whacking, but an intelligent software layer Verizon calls its Automated Resource Engine. The Automated Resource Engine stores physical server images on a SAN not the server enabling physical servers to be moved and reprovisioned in minutes much the way VMWare’s VMotion does for virtual servers.

By supporting physical and virtual severs, CaaS positions Verizon to address a missing spot in the cloud computing market. Many cloud computing services today are based around virtual machines, which aren’t well suited for delivering I/O intensive applications, such as database or email servers. Delivering physical servers enables Verizon to target these markets. By focussing on redundant configurations the company claims to be able to drop overall costs by 30 to 60 percent. According to the SLAs, Verizon will deliver virtual servers within 60 minutes of ordering and physical servers within 120 minutes.

CaaS caps a series of cloud computing roll outs for Verizon over the past two weeks that saw the introduction of Asset Assurance fault management, monitoring and reporting tools, an enhanced Internet Security Assessment service, and new managed security capabilities. The new service positions Verizon against rival AT&T not to mention providers such as Amazon and numerous hosting offers.

If there’s something lacking today in CaaS it’s automation. Verizon does not provide enable organizations to automate their CaaS implementations the way they can do today with their data centers. Verizon says it plans to expose the API underlying the Automated Resource Engine enabling organizations to automate  SaaS though a specific date for that release was not made available.

CaaS is currently available in the U.S. and Europe and will be rolled out to the Asia-Pacific region in August. Pricing is highly dependent on the customer requirements.Verizon requires organizations to purchase at least one virtual farm ($24-$28 per day) against which they can provision virtual or physical server resources. Each virtual farm includes: a multi-tiered Network (DMZ / Trust VLANs), firewall, and load balancing. Virtual servers ($8 - $12 per day) can be configured with Windows. The virtual machines assume a single CPU with 1 Gbyte of RAM and 20 Gbytes of storage. Physical servers ($17 - $22 per day) are also configured with Windows and consist of a four core system with 8 Gbytes of RAM and 50 Gbytes of storage.