Sports fans visiting the official Web site of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) to stay abreast of athlete blogs and other site features are expected to experience uninterrupted service as the site is being powered by AT&T’s new global utility computing service, the company said.
The globally-available service, AT&T Synaptic Hosting, offers enterprises and mid-sized businesses managed networking, security and storage, and takes advantage of the telco’s existing network infrastructure to provide reliability and scalability, said James Paterson, vice-president of product development, with AT&T’s hosting and application services group. “What [customers] really want is that same flexibility they get with the network and they want it in the computing realm as well.”
Businesses whose needs are seasonal, unpredictable, or where end user traffic tends to spike, like with the USOC site, can have the assurance of uptime and available capacity when required, said Paterson. The USOC site may not have seen a huge amount of traffic in the months leading up to the Olympics, but Paterson said “as we approach Friday’s opening ceremony in Beijing, they obviously are going to see a spike in traffic and they are looking for the ability to burst, similar to the network burst, on the computing side as well.”
Fluctuating end user traffic aside, the hosted service responds to such business needs as a three-month trial of a Web application or micro site, or performing a 6-12 month SAP application upgrade, said Paterson.
The new service, which Paterson describes as “very wide-reaching” can be accessed from anywhere in the world and combines technology acquired by AT&T from application service provider USinternetworking with five “super” Internet data centres located in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
The fact that different jurisdictions have nuances in compliance regulations is also taken into account with this service, according to Paterson.
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