Customers Call the Shots -- Verizon Cloud Adds Business Value with Quality of Service

Both businesses and consumers rely on public clouds for a range of tasks and activities from collaboration and video streaming to gmail and Netflix. New companies are born with just a dozen employees, a laptop and an Internet connection practically overnight. This is all thanks to cloud computing.
It’s no surprise that in the next six years, almost 90 percent of new spending on Internet and communications technologies, a $5 trillion global business, will be on cloud-based technology, according to industry analyst firm IDC. Cloud applications will also account for 90 percent of total mobile data traffic by 2018, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013–2018.
The benefits for users are almost too numerous to count, but most IT professionals agree that cloud computing epitomizes constant change. Its ability to provide ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of networks, servers, storage, and services whenever and wherever they are needed is creating both market opportunity and market upheaval.
To temper the turbulence, capitalize on the opportunities and best prepare for any number of cloud unknowns, several of the world’s largest public providers including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, IBM/SoftLayer and Verizon Terremark rely on Xen Project virtualization. Open source Xen Project software offers superior IT efficiencies, workload balancing, hyperscalability and tight security by running VMs on a cloud service.
While today the media is focusing on price wars and the possible commoditization of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), cloud providers like Verizon Terremark are innovating with novel Quality of Service agreements and new levels of automation. In his talk in Chicago at our Xen Project Developer Summit, Verizon Terremark’s Don Slutz will present an overview of the Verizon Cloud architecture based on Xen.
“It’s the core foundation of the Verizon Cloud, allowing our users to run any type or size workload they’d like to. Xen is critical to Verizon. Competing solutions were either too cost prohibitive or lacked the security controls that Xen has,” Don said.
Verizon Terremark is a long-time advocate of open standards and is more actively involved than ever before in the open source ecosystem. Verizon sponsors and participates in Xen Project software, invests in CloudStack and most recently joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, hoping to see the cloud market mature quickly and provide businesses with cloud-based offerings that address specific needs like performance, choice, cost and flexibility.
For the past three years, Don has worked on integrating and designing Xen for the Verizon Cloud architecture along with seven full-time engineers. Today, clients are fully deployed on Verizon’s IaaS based on Xen. A focal point of his talk will be Verizon’s Quality of Service (QoS) goals with CPU, memory, network and disk performance.
“Often clouds end up requiring far too much support personnel, which we are trying to rectify. With our QoS agreement, we allow users to set the performance parameters their business requires and guarantee that Verizon will back these up at all times. Instead of focusing on speed or load size, we’ll guarantee certain CPU, memory, network or disk performance. This is really unique in the industry,” he added.
In addition to delivering workload efficiency, security and cost savings to its cloud customers, Verizon is also giving back to the Xen Project community.
“We’re working to make Verizon Cloud a high capacity service that allows people to move existing VMs easily onto it it,” Don said. “Our goal is to add enough VMWare support so that a guest can be exported from VMWare and automatically run without any changes on Xen.”
Verizon’s VMWare code is currently in review and in the past year has contributed 40 change sets that totals 4,300 lines of code.
Proof that demand for cloud services is growing and spurring more change, Don will also address Verizon’s design goals to move from three to seven data centers in the near future. If you’re interested in learning more, be sure to register today for the Xen Project Developer Summit to hear Don present on Tuesday, August 19 from 9 to 9:45 a.m.
About Don Slutz
Currently, Don works for Verizon Terremark enhancing Xen, which is the basis for Verizon Cloud. He got started early (1970) in computers because of his father Dr. Ralph J. Slutz and spent 16 years at Prime Computer in operating systems. He has extensive networking, performance, and testing experience.