The speed and power at which an application needs to run vary greatly depending on the nature of the task at hand. Sub-second response times aren't needed for an email program, but they certainly are for a trading application. Real-time transactions and Big Data number crunching are just two activities for which banks increasingly seek access to high-performance computing.
Verizon on Thursday said it is building a new cloud computing and storage offering that will let companies draw computing resources at the level of performance they need, with the corresponding price point (obviously, the higher the performance, the greater the cost). Customers will also be able to change performance levels on the fly within a virtual machine in the forthcoming cloud offering, Verizon executives say.
The new cloud technology, Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage, will be offered on a limited basis at first, but eventually deployed in all of Verizon's data centers. It has already been installed in Verizon data centers in Culpeper, Va.; Englewood, Colo.; Miami; Santa Clara, Calif.; Amsterdam; London; and Sao Paolo. Initially, clients will be served out of the Culpeper data center, with other centers expected to be added through mid-2014.
A public beta release of the enhanced cloud will be available for testing shortly. The full service will be live in mid-2014.
The telecom company's existing cloud offering, Verizon Enterprise Cloud, is contract-based and offers no performance guarantees.
The financial industry has up to now typically used cloud services for "non mission-critical" work such as application development and testing, corporate apps and services, and analytics, says Chandan Sharma, managing director, financial services practice, Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
This is starting to change, however. This week, National Australia Bank revealed that it is running its website on Amazon's public cloud.
Most cloud providers cannot guarantee high performance for storage and networks around assets that are shared in multitenant environments, Sharma says. "This is very different, and we believe that will have a substantial resonance with the enterprise market," he says.
Verizon's next generation cloud offering, Cloud Compute, will use a fabric-based computing model to offer flexibility and deterministic performance. In fabric computing, compute nodes are woven together to pool together the processing power and memory of all the computers in the group. It will also incorporate Verizon's software-defined network technology.
Cloud Compute customers will be able to choose the gigahertz of the processors running their apps, the amount of RAM those processors use, and the performance in I/Os per second per disk. They'll be able to share disks between virtual machines. And customers will be able to choose network performance, from 60 megabytes per second up to a gigabyte per second, Verizon executives say.
The user interface for the enhanced cloud products will let customers provision virtual machines in less than a minute, executives say. Users will also be able to set up their own networks in the Compute Cloud.
"We believe we're opening up possibilities to applications and services that previously people weren't comfortable with on any cloud," he says. "We've taken a step up in performance and capabilities that will make people take these assets up for additional use cases."
It will also work the other way when a project that called for high-performance computing, such as testing a high-end application, is done, customers can drop down to a lower cloud level.
"When you don't need that much throughput, you can dial the performance down and pay less," says Troy Garrison, vice president of cloud experience at Verizon Terremark.
The new cloud offering, like Verizon's existing one, can be integrated with co-located or on-premise IT infrastructure, such as databases and storage, through APIs Verizon will provide.
Large banks often like to tie clouds into their provisioning applications. "For the banks we work with, that API is critical," says Garrison. The APIs Verizon is currently using for Enterprise Cloud will also be compatible with Compute and Storage Cloud.
For security purposes, Verizon is running the cloud on private VLANS, so no two customers will be on the same network. In the new cloud storage environment, Verizon is adding encryption at rest and in transit to secure data.
"We're building this platform in such a way that financial institutions will be able to impose their own virtual security model as an extension of their data centers into the services and workloads they run in our cloud," Sharma says.
