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Verizon Business has bulked up its Computing-as-a -Service (CaaS) on-demand cloud computing infrastructure on Thursday to further advance its "Everything-as-a-Service" vision.
And while CaaS is not yet available through the channel, Verizon Business cloud computing product manager Patrick Verhoeven said the CaaS roadmap includes channel availability in the near future.
Verizon's CaaS offering lets enterprises and SMBs provision infrastructure and on-demand computing resources like physical and virtual server, storage and network capacity. All provisioning on Verizon CaaS is managed via Verizon's management portal.
According to Verhoeven, the CaaS update adds a new server cloning option which lets IT admins customize configurations of CaaS virtual servers by creating a reference server image, or a golden image, that can be reused to speed deployment of server clones supporting the same application. For example, if an admin tweaks an operating system or application setting, or localizes server languages, that customization can be repeated using server cloning.
Verizon also expanded the applications and operating systems supported by SaaS, adding SUSE Linux, which is commonly used in ERP packages; and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which has been added as a click-to-provision server option. The addition of SUSE Linux and SQL Server 2008 augments the support for Windows, Red Hat, Apache and SQL Server 2005 that CaaS already supports.
Lastly, the updated CaaS offering bolsters network flexibility, adding the virtual router and shared VPNs, including Verizon Private IP, to connect back-end systems to Verizon CaaS via the online portal. Additionally, Verizon now offers CaaS users metered, burstable bandwidth up to 1 Gbps to add immediate and temporary compute capacity. Verhoeven said that the burstable bandwidth option lets users only pay for what they're using, so if they're not using bandwidth, they're not paying for it.
Along with the updates to CaaS, Verizon on Thursday also completed its first annual SAS 70 Type II examination. The SAS 70 auditing standard illustrates that Verizon's CaaS data centers are in compliance and Verizon has the controls and processes in place to manage and monitor its CaaS platforms along with customer applications and infrastructure. Verhoeven said the successful SAS 70 completion can ease the concerns of potential customers as they evaluate moving critical IT services to the cloud.
