Virtualized infrastructure key to enticing enterprise to carrier cloud services

There has been a tremendous boom of U.S. providers of cloud-delivered infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. In addition to AT&T, Verizon and other service providers getting into IaaS, there are a slew of vendors like Amazon, Google, Joyent, Terremark, GoGrid, Savvis, and a variety of start-ups entering the market.

This makes for an interesting mix of old and new, but also opens the risk of making cloud infrastructure services a commodity market very quickly. So how can telcos lure IT managers to their cloud offerings amid all the noise? Perhaps if carriers can ease the pain of migration to cloud for IT managers, they might come out ahead of their competition.

“No one wants to engage in a price war,” contends Eitan Bremler, marketing manager, responsible for virtualization and cloud at vendor Radware. Bremler believes enterprise customers’ applications will suffer if not virtualized, but that virtualization is stymied due to massive confusion in the market and a reluctance by IT managers to proceed. “They continue to work in non-virtualized, hybrid network settings where the environment limits performance levels and frustrates end-users,” said Bremler.

Rather than offering basic cloud services with “no SLA” or “low SLA,” telco cloud providers would do better to up the ante by deliver SLA-guaranteed services via a fully virtualized infrastructure to their enterprise customers. This could present a real opportunity, as service providers already have the expertise other cloud providers lack with managed services (i.e., monitoring performance, degradations and failures in services and networks).

The key to selling robust-SLA services will be proving that the migration of applications from enterprise data centers to telco clouds can make life easier for IT managers—currently loathe to learn new equipment, processes and protocols.

The ADC is more than eye candy

If telecom service providers can be the first to court IT managers grappling with routing, networking and load balancing issues as they move their IT infrastructure to the cloud, they can get ahead in providing the assurance IT managers require to protect themselves as data moves outside their four walls and into the cloud.

A good start is for service providers to allow IT managers within enterprises the choice to use the application delivery controller, ADC, of their choice. ADCs are an emerging phenomenon that positions a single device – the ADC – to replace older server-based load balancers to offload dozens or even hundreds of servers. This is an extremely compelling feature for IT managers struggling to migrate applications to cloud environments. If telcos can offer IT managers the flexibility to migrate from legacy server-load balancing (SLB) to ADC products offering offload and acceleration on top of load-balancing, then it becomes a win-win for all.

“Currently, there is a hesitation by IT managers to virtualize the ADC layer because moving a physical appliance with which you are familiar into the cloud hasn’t really been an option. IT managers want to stick to what they know, and the lack of choices has prevented full alignment for the applications running on virtualized servers, which provide application delivery services,” said Bremler, reiterating that many IT managers continue to work in non-virtualized, hybrid network settings where performance is not optimal as a result.

Bremler’s point is that if telco cloud providers enabled IT managers to provision their own ADCs as a front-end to Web applications, than they would be more likely to migrate applications to the cloud, as they wouldn’t have to learn new equipment and processes.

“IT managers would like the opportunity to offload the responsibility to a [service provider] through an advanced feature set in their cloud service options. If an IT manager can get the same features through the cloud that he or she would have in her own data center, but without the headache of buying and managing new hardware, then the ‘soft form’ of the appliances would become attractive,” said Bremler.

With ADCs, enterprise IT managers can get the assurances they seek about performance and management through SLAs. For example, a low SLA for a “silver” enterprise customer can be handled by a virtual appliance, and a high SLA for a “platinum” enterprise customer would require a dedicated hardware appliance (one that could potentially be resold by the CSP to its platinum enterprise customers).

As service providers move to offer tiers of SLAs, with silver, gold or platinum (‘no SLA,’ ‘low SLA,’ or ‘high SLA’) guarantees, then their managed hosting environments evolve from just offering computing to environments in which they can resell dedicated servers, ADCs, or private clouds—all of which would be managed in the telco cloud.

How CSPs can do this?

For service providers moving deeper into cloud computing, what is the easiest way to offer IT managers the opportunity to use either their own ADCs or to buy ADCs from the carrier to front-end applications?

According to Bremler, the easiest way is for carriers to seek partners familiar with integrating the likes of VMware or virtual servers into the construction of telco data centers. “To improve the value of cloud offerings with the flexibility to resell or virtualize the ADC, you want to look for partners with muti-tiered solutions for managing ADCs, web tiers, app tiers and storage tiers. And you want your ADC provider to integrate into your workflows so that when services are provisioned with enterprise customers, the workflow is automatically in place,” said Bremler, noting that Radware is already partnering with service providers in EMEA, and is in discussions with one in North America.

As telco cloud providers integrate an SLA mindset into the cloud through sophisticated use of ADCs, they can turn traditional capital expenditures into pay-as-you-go operational expenses by reselling to enterprises not only computing resources, but application delivery services that save IT managers the headaches of buying and managing more hardware as they move into the cloud.