Friday 03 September 2010
– Takes the lead in leveraging virtualization & management technologies to deliver cloud computing for large enterprises
– Offers ‘Pay as you go’ enterprise class IT infrastructure & reduced IT management hassle for SMBs
– Reliance Cloud Computing Services to target 35 million businesses
In a move that combines the power of virtualization technology and cloud computing - Reliance Data Center (a part of Reliance Communications) today announced the launch of “Reliance Cloud Computing Services” - hosted infrastructure service for its customers, based on the Microsoft platform.
With this, Reliance will provide enterprises and SMBs in India, access to a variety of enterprise scale IT solutions, applications and services on the pay as you go model. These include infrastructure services such as server hosting, data storage and archival, as well as business applications like e-mail, ERP, workflow automation, document management; IT monitoring and reporting, disaster recovery, firewall services and automatic security updates. Microsoft’s virtualization and management technologies will help Reliance reduce the input costs involved in providing these services. As a result, Reliance will be able to pass the cost benefits to its customers. Furthermore, with “Reliance Cloud Computing Services” available on the pay-as-you-go model, businesses (both large and small) will be able to address their technology requirements without bearing costs involved in procuring, deploying and maintaining additional IT resources.
“Leveraging Microsoft’s cutting edge technologies, Reliance Data Center will deliver access to enterprise-class scalable, secure and reliable hosted IT infrastructure to help large, midsized and SMB companies leverage cloud computing technologies to drive business benefits. This is part of our long term vision to continuously provide the latest and best technology to our customers, so that they always enjoy a business edge against their competitors”, said Mr. George Varghese, President & Head, Enterprise Business, Reliance Communications.
Today, 35 million business owners in India spend a mere 0.4 to 3 percent of their total revenues on IT. Despite increasing capacity and technology requirements - high upfront costs involved in procuring and deploying IT infrastructure, and overall need for cash flows has been cited as a deterrent to technology penetration, especially in case of SMBs in India. However, increasing awareness around the relevance and advantage of hosted solutions is changing this scenario. “Hosted IT offerings are a cost effective model for provisioning processes, applications and services while making IT management easier and more responsive to business needs. We believe businesses have matured in their IT strategies and are now ready to explore hosted infrastructure as an option not only for short term scalability needs but also longer term requirements”, added Mr. Varghese. In fact, according to a recent Gartner report - technology adopters are expected to purchase 40% of their IT infrastructure “as a service” by 2011.
Mr. Rajan Anandan – Managing Director, Microsoft India said, “We believe that the world of technology will never be only-cloud or only in-premise. The best customer value will be delivered as a combination, and Reliance Communications represents this. By combining the best of software with the best of cloud-based services, Microsoft can deliver more compelling solutions for businesses of all sizes. Today, Microsoft is delighted to empower Reliance with the ability to offer an innovative and affordable business solution for their customers.”
Using Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Centre toolkit (an end-to-end guidance for leveraging virtualization infrastructure of Windows Server 2008 R2/ Hyper-V coupled with System Center to create managed services and partner hosted cloud offerings), Reliance is taking the lead in making cloud computing a reality for businesses in India. “Thanks to Microsoft, we can cut down on server sprawl and related capital costs across Reliance data centers – and are geared up to deliver what is arguably India’s largest cloud infrastructure today”, added Mr. Varghese.
“Microsoft’s virtualization and management technologies deliver one of the highest return on investment in the market today. Reliance is betting on Microsoft to deliver the power of cloud computing to customers in India, and this is a true testament to the strong value that Microsoft can deliver”, added Mr. Anandan.
‘Reliance Cloud Computing Services’, targeted towards SMB as well as enterprise customers will essentially involve creation of a central computing + data storage IT infrastructure at the data centre, and then offering the same to multiple end customers as a standardized packaged offerings, accessible through public Internet, on a shared / virtual, pay on usage model.
Various software applications (including mailing, sales force automation, HR automation, logistics, supply chain, ERP, document management, work flow automation, billing, CRM) and underlying IT infrastructure like server computing, data storage and retrieval, disaster recovery, application development platforms and security tools will be offered by us under this banner.
The benefits to end customers will include cost reduction, cash flow improvement, pay per use (instead of upfront capex), better time to market, high quality managed services at fraction of cost, 24*7 accessibility from anywhere in the world, no need for high end IT skill sets, unlimited scalability, focus on their core business and hence essentially peace of mind.
About Reliance Communications
Reliance Communications Limited founded by the late Shri Dhirubhai H Ambani (1932-2002) is the flagship company of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group currently has a net worth in excess of Rs. 64,000 crore (US$ 13.6 billion), cash flows of Rs. 13,000 crore (US$ 2.8 billion), net profit of Rs. 8,400 crore (US$ 1.8 billion).
Reliance Communications is India’s foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The Company, with a customer base of over 90 million including over 2.5 million individual overseas retail customers, ranks among the Top 5 Telecom companies in the world by number of customers in a single country. Reliance Communications corporate clientele includes 2,100 Indian and multinational corporations, and over 800 global, regional and domestic carriers.
Reliance Communications has established a pan-India, next generation, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class services spanning the entire communications value chain, covering over 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages. Reliance Communications owns and operates the world’s largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 190,000 kilometers of fibre optic cable systems in India, USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.
About Microsoft India
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software - any time, any place and on any device. Microsoft Corporation India Private Ltd is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation USA. It has had a presence in India since 1990 and currently has offices in thirteen cities - Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Indore, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur, New Delhi, and Pune.
Database in the Cloud
Joyent, the leading vendor in Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing, announced today that it is taking the proven performance and reliability of Sun Microsystems’ MySQL database to a whole new level by offering optimizations to the Joyent Cloud for MySQL. Joyent and Sun’s database group have teamed up to create Virtual Appliance templates for MySQL.
Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL is configured to maximize the open source database’s performance on Joyent’s powerful, secure and stable virtualization technology. Performance benchmarks (http://www.joyent.com/mysql) demonstrate that Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL can deliver 3 times the number of Transactions per Second than comparable deployments of XEN-based clouds, such as Amazon’s EC2.
“Running Read-Only tests, our internal benchmarks show that a 1GB Virtual Appliance for MySQL in the Joyent cloud can perform 1,245 transactions per second with 8 threads,” said Jason Hoffman, Joyent CTO and Founder. “A more expensive 7.5 GB large instance on Amazon EC2 only manages 425 transactions per second with the same 8 threads.”
Joyent has made it easy to launch a Virtual Appliance for MySQL as a single instance or as part of a Web-scale architecture.
“MySQL is pre-installed and optimized on the Joyent Cloud,” said Hoffman. “From the minute you get your login credentials, you are ready to go: deployment could not be easier. Dual-Master or Master-Slave configurations will also soon be available as pre-defined architectures.”
The Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL is available based on a typical cloud model. Users can scale up and down when they need to — and pay for only the infrastructure they use. There are no contracts to lock-in users. Additionally, the Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL Enterprise is fully supported by the MySQL database experts at Sun.
“MySQL is the most-used database in today’s Cloud environments,” said Rich Nigro, MySQL Managed Hosting Business Manager, Sun Microsystems. “We are delighted to see that Joyent is making this dedicated MySQL offering available to users of the popular Joyent Cloud.”
The Joyent Cloud has many customers benefiting from MySQL, and there are several case studies of how the optimized implementation has driven application performance, operational stability and value.
“Context Optional provides scalable solutions for brand marketing across social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter,” said Rafi Jacoby, Director of Engineering at Context Optional. “We’ve built and deployed viral applications for Kraft, Toyota, McDonald’s, MTV/Viacom, and many other Fortune 500 brands using MySQL running on the Joyent Cloud. We’ve been impressed with performance and uptime, with several databases having run more than a billion queries with no downtime.”
MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At http://www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with premium subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.
About Joyent, Inc.
Joyent is a vendor of ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), a.k.a Cloud Computing. Joyent provides a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to buying and running your own IT infrastructure, while still providing all the security, cost stability, and enterprise-grade performance of a dedicated private data center. The Joyent Cloud is built using the company’s unique networking and virtualization technology, the Joyent Accelerator. Joyent’s shared hosting, virtual appliances, free developer programs and Cloud Computing products leverage the Joyent Accelerator to provide our customers with unparalleled Cloud Computing performance and value.
Joyent was founded in 2004 with a seed investment from co-founder and CEO David Young and Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel. Since then, Joyent has grown organically and has been completely funded by revenue. Joyent’s customers include LinkedIn, Major League Baseball, Gilt.com, Facebook, and 20,000 other companies ranging from small development shops to large Fortune 500 enterprise users. Joyent powers 25% of the daily application traffic on Facebook. www.joyent.com
The reason it is difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system is because each application has unique needs which conflict or compete with the unique needs of other applications. Virtualization technology, such as that provided by VMware or Citrix with XenServer, breaks the bond of the application to a physical server by placing a layer of software, called a hypervisor, on the physical hardware beneath the operating system instances that support each application. The applications are “isolated” from one another inside virtual machines, and this isolation eliminates the conflicts.
Amazon embraces this virtualization model by using Xen to enable their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. I can tell you that there are lots of folks asking lots of questions about how to enable Windows applications in the “cloud.” I do not believe the answer is “Windows for EC2″ plus “Windows for GoGrid” plus “Windows for Rackspace” plus “Windows for [insert your data-center cloud name here].” If Microsoft does not find a way to turn the licensing ship and embrace JeOS, the market. irtualization enables the separation of the application from the infrastructure upon which it runs - making possible a level of business agility and dynamicism previously unthinkable. Imagine being able to run your applications on-demand in any data-center around the world that exposes the hypervisor (any hypervisor) as the runtime environment.
Private clouds allow organisations to easily manage their own hardware resources in-house. Using virtualization technology they can alter the provided computing to suit the work at hand. This makes it easier for them to provide the necessary infrastructure for their users, even if these needs change rapidly over time. In the future this approach could help sites to increase their resources by using commercial cloud providers during peak loads. The two teams will work together to explore how the institutes providing computing resources to EGEE could benefit from adopting a ‘private cloud’ model to provide resources.
The RESERVOIR virtualisation manager builds on the open source project OpenNebula which has been developed at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The group’s aim is to make management of cloud resources easier using virtual machine technology. RESERVOIR offers the ability for EGEE sites to easily meet the changing needs of the users, from scaling-up services to meet peak loads and improving redundancy, to changing the resources provided to run particular applications.
