Every competitor in IaaS scenario is more than welcome to my eyes, especially if the player is beefy like Verizon could prove to be.
Combining VMware technology, Cisco UCS and HP Blade servers, Verizon has already entered in the market with the Terremark Enterprise Cloud and Enterprise Cloud Managed edition offerings for enterprises and, in the fourth quarter, the company will launch in beta Verizon Cloud a new IaaS platform made of two services: Verizon Cloud Compute, equivalent of Amazon EC3 and Verizon Cloud Storage equivalent of Amazon S3 storage.
Even if the current Enterprise Cloud offerings will be maintained the direction that Verizon is taking leads to an accessible, billed-per-hours, open-source Xen-based instances.
Verizon aims to be a bigger player in the cloud panorama competitive versus Amazon, Microsoft and Google and has chosen to achieve this with two elements: self-service selectable levels of service and software-defined data centers.
The distinguishing factor, in fact, will be the chance to build a customized server with the desired amount of CPU, memory and storage in contrast with the trend to provide to customers predetermined combinations of resources.
To achieve their goals, these new solutions were custom designed for Verizon from a third-party partner, that achieved a density of 64 servers, 4 TB of RAM and 100 TB of storage in a single 10u “box” engineered to have a small quantity of hardware easily-upgradable components.
Both solutions will be launched in seven Verizon’s data centers: Culpepper, Va., Santa Clara, Calif., Denver, Miami, London, Amsterdam and Sao Paulo, Brazil; Asia will be added in 2014.
Even if the Verizon Cloud will be as agnostic as possible, supporting many hypervisors, APIs and VM image formats, to determine its success Verizon should focus on adding capabilities more valuable to developers exploring also the opportunity for a PaaS offering.