DiData releases new cloud products
On Friday, Dimension Data (DiData) released its public cloud product in Australia, unveiling it alongside a number of other offerings, including a managed private cloud service.
The company had already been operating its public cloud in the US, which it brought over from its OpSource acquisition in June 2011.
It has now released cloud services in Australia. The public cloud can be controlled through a self-service portal called Dimension Data Cloud Control, which allows customers to provision and manage their workloads, spinning them up and down as they require. The Application Programming Interface is also publicly available.
The cloud service is available as a pay-as-you-go plan or a monthly plan. Organisations can use a credit card to sign up or can set up an account, according to Dimension Data general manager datacentre solutions Peter Prowse, and the minimum amount of time for billing purposes is one hour.
The pay-as-you-go pricing for Dimension Data's public cloud.
(Credit: Dimension Data)
Customers can choose to have their data "geofenced", remaining in Australia in the company's datacentre in Sydney. The company also has datacentres on the east and west coasts of the US, as well as in Amsterdam. Within 30 to 60 days, datacentres will also come online in South Africa and Asia.
Data will not be failed over to another datacentre if anything goes wrong with the datacentre in Sydney. However, Prowse said that the service-level agreements provide uptime of 99.99 per cent.
The product is being targeted both at enterprise and government organisations that are looking to take advantage of cloud services locally, and the multinationals that want a global cloud presence.
The "fully managed" private cloud service that the company has also released, which sees the company offer cloud services and support in a client datacentre, has the ability to burst into the public cloud if desired, Prowse said. The private cloud service could also be hosted in Dimension Data's datacentre.
The company is also offering a service for providers that want to offer a branded cloud service. This would see the Dimension Data service deployed in either the provider's own datacentre or in Dimension Data's, but customised with the provider's own brand.
Dimension Data announced that the ac3 (Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications) has chosen Dimension Data to provide it with the latter service, hosted in ac3's datacentre. Ac3 is jointly owned by the NSW Government and eight NSW universities, with the NSW Government being one of the company's clients. Ac3 will use Dimension Data's service to provide infrastructure as a service, along with storage, data-management services and perimeter-security services.
Dimension Data also released a "Cloud Enablement" consulting and integration service to help customers make the move to the cloud.