AT&T intros cloud computing service

AT&T (NYSE:T) announced what it calls its Compute-as-a-Service offering today, an echo of the cloud computing service Verizon announced in June.
In accordance with consumption-based billing models characteristic of cloud computing services, AT&T’s CaaS charges per central processing unit per hour and bills monthly. And it can be accessed over public, private or virtual private networks.

CaaS uses the vCloud application program interface (API) from AT&T’s partner, VMWare (NYSE: VMW). The two companies hope to sell customers on the ease of using the same interface to manage both internal and external clouds.

“CIOs can securely move workloads in and out of the AT&T cloud and treat it as an extension of their internal IT,” said Dan Chu, VMWare vice president.

AT&T brings to the table the global reach of its existing MPLS network as well as a reputation for security that it argues newer cloud computing providers don’t have. Its new computing offering joins the hosting and storage services in its 18-month-old Synaptic-brand service portfolio.
Features of the new CaaS offering include:

· A Web portal to order, provision and manage server capacity, or to program the APIs.
· A monthly bill -- only for the capacity used -- that can be paid with a credit card.
· Multiple storage options including disk capacity for each virtual server’s operating system and space to share files between virtual servers, as well as the ability to connect to AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service.
· Round-the-clock monitoring by AT&T support teams.
· A service level agreement that covers availability of the platform that runs the customer’s virtual servers.