Friday 03 September 2010
All hosting is carried out in Orange Business Services ISO 9001 certified data centres. The company has given no indication of whose technology the service is based on. Flexible Computing offers completely customisable virtual server architectures to address the growing demand in terms of performance, availability and of security,” Orange Business says. The service is designed to accommodate “all businesses, from small to large.” Orange Business says the number of virtual machines, the processor speed as well as the amount of RAM and hard disk space are completely configurable. “No investment is entailed and expenses are limited to a monthly service plan and installation costs, meaning that businesses keep their IT budget tight.”
Verizon Business says this enables organisations to employ computing resources in the quantities and duration dictated by their business needs, paying only for the resources used and avoiding having to build out for peak capacity requirements by buying new equipment and adding staff. The Verizon service is being rolled out now in the US and Europe and will be rolled out to the Asia-Pacific region in August. The service seems very similar that launched by Verizon Business in early June. Dubbed Computing as a Service (CaaS) it provides its enterprise customers with IT resources such as servers, network and storage ‘in the cloud’ and accessible on demand via a web portal.
The new HP ProLiant SL server line, the latest addition to the HP ExSO portfolio for scale-out computing, comprises an open 2U chassis, which holds fans and power supplies, and task-specific server nodes that slip into the hardware’s rail-and-tray design. The ProLiant SL chassis fits into any standard rack from HP or third parties. Next is the SL160z, which is designed for large memory-cache apps. The server has 18 dual in-line memory module slots and up to two PCI slots. Finally, the SL170z is built for large storage applications such as Web search and database apps. The server has up to six large form-factor Serial ATA or serial-attached SCSI hard drives. HP is initially making three server nodes available. The first is the ProLiant SL2×170z, which fits two servers in a 1U tray. The servers are designed to support highly dense applications found in high-performance computing and Web front-end environments.
The new systems are scheduled to be available in July. Pricing will vary according to configuration and order volume. HP also offers management software and services as options for the ProLiant SL product line. HP, Intel, and Yahoo last year launched the Open Cirrus cloud computing test bed with a goal of promoting collaboration among businesses, government agencies, and colleges and universities. More than 50 research projects are plugged into Open Cirrus. Cloud computing is a type of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Companies operating such environments include Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com. Small and midmarket companies are particularly interested in running applications on vendors’ cloud computing environments in order to avoid building large IT infrastructures.
