Telus gets into infrastructure-as-a-service

Howard Solomon

12 years ago

The latest entrant in the race to offer organizations the ability to buy infrastructure as a service is a telecommunications carrier.

Telus Communications Co. said Tuesday it will create a series of cloud services under the AgilIT brand, the first of which is called Virtual Private Cloud.

It promises to deliver computing resources on-demand to medium- and large-sized organizations, or companies that see IT as a strategic resource.

It’s the latest data centre product from Telus, which has been offering hosting services for some time.

The IaaS product “was designed and architected to provide a reliable complement to the IT infrastructure managed by businesses,” said Adi Kabazo, manager of products and services at Telus’ cloud services division.

Organizations will have a choice of three compute pools. The entry-level pool, which costs $995 a month, lets a subscribe buy up to 2.5 GHz of computing cycles and 5 Gigabytes of memory. Storage is also available at an extra price.

Within the pool, a subscriber can provision as many virtual machines as needed.

It addition, online management tools let organizations segregate resources by project or department.

Storage is sold separately.

The other compute pools available for purchase are 5 GHz of cycles and up to 10 GB of RAM, and 10 GHz of CPU and 20 GB of memory. Subscribers have a choice of three- or six-month terms.

Telus is offering a 99.95 per cent uptime service level guarantee.

Mark Schrutt, director of services and enterprise applications research at IDC Canada, noted that IaaS is being offered in Canada by a number of providers including IBM. “What makes this different is that a telecom owns the network, so can provide end-to-end services and SLAs because it has more control.”

He expects BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada will have its own infrastructure as a service offering in the next quarter.

The service will be run from a Telus data centre in Toronto that uses servers from Hewlett-Packard Co., with AMD Opteron processors, running VMware’s vSphere 5 hypervisor. The data centre fabric is managed by Xsigo Systems Inc.

Virtual Private Cloud subscribers will manage the service themselves through a Web portal, said Kabazo, which gives them the ability to deploy and change virtual machines remotely. As such, he said, “it’s designed for administrators that are knowledgeable with virtual infrastructure.