Verizon Intros Cloudlike Services Offering

Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications, this week unveiled its Computing-as-a-Service, or CaaS solution, for government and enterprise customers.

CaaS provides dynamic provisioning of server, storage, network and firewall resources, which can be turned on or off as needed through a portal, said Joe Crawford, executive director of IT solutions product management and development at Verizon.

Data hosted on Verizon's CaaS infrastructure is auditable according to the SAS 70 standard and is compliant with the ISO 27001 information security management standard, Crawford said.

Crawford called CaaS a "cloudlike" service instead of a "cloud" service.

While cloud-based computing means that a customer's applications and data may reside anywhere on a hosted service provider's infrastructure without the customer being aware of the location, CaaS provides customers with that information, he said.

"The customer knows exactly where their data is, and where their servers are," he said. "The customer has the ability to dynamically provision their computer and storage resources, turn those resources up and down, and know where they are, and can feel comfortable when their data is on our system."

Much of the underlying infrastructure for CaaS comes from Hewlett-Packard, said Anand Eswaran, vice president of professional services for software and solutions at HP.

On the hardware side, Verizon is using HP's Blade System line of server, storage and networking blades. Verizon is also using HP's Business Service Automation (BSA) software suite for dynamic provisioning of the infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go model and for orchestrating the server and network automation, along with HP's professional services, Eswaran said.

Verizon's CaaS also uses networked storage from Fremont, Calif.-based 3PAR, as well as firewall equipment from Cisco, Crawford said.

Customers can have a virtual system provisioned in about 30 minutes, or a physical system provisioned in about 60 minutes, Crawford said. The systems are charged for on a per-day basis, he said.

Verizon's CaaS is currently available direct to end-user customers, but the company is having discussions about how to make it available to other service providers via some sort of reseller agreement, Crawford said.

Verizon is not the first large service provider to build such an infrastructure.

AT&T last month said it is working with EMC's Atmos technology to develop a cloud computing infrastructure.