Following on from its $1.4bn acquisition by Verizon earlier this year, datacentre service provider, Terremark, has just opened a new showcase Network Access Point (NAP) datacentre at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
But it is Verizon’s latest acquisition, Cloud Switch, and what that might offer users looking to use this new European Cloud service delivery hub, that could prove to be a tastily baited hook to catch them by. Cloud Switch was barely past the start up stage when Verizon moved a couple of weeks ago to acquire the company.
The software it has developed provides what is, in effect, an isolation layer, or `container’, that allows an enterprise workload to be moved to another platform as an entity. This includes all its attendant policies and management requirements.
One very important capability, particularly for larger enterprises, is that it provides the tools required to allow a legacy, on-premise application to be ported to and exploited in the Cloud . This has the potential to overcome one of the most compelling arguments enterprise IT managements have against the Cloud – namely the cost, complexity and risk of re-engineering and porting legacy applications to the Cloud .
But this Cloud Switch capability is built on a trick that could be even more significant in its own right, particularly to enterprises operating in the compliance-conscious European Community, where regulations and strictures on such issues as the physical location of data can be both tough and inhibiting.
This is the ability to create encrypted tunnels between systems such as the on-premise legacy environment and the new Cloud host environment. But it can be just as easily be used to tunnel between different service providers, building exact working replicas of the application, data and full management environment.
Such a capability provides an answer to the many location-compliance regulations that are prevalent across Europe. As was confirmed by Kerry Bailey, Group President of Terremark Worldwide, this capability makes it possible to inject a virtual compliance environment into a datacentre anywhere in the world. In other words, the compliance regime of country `A’ can be created and run on servers located in country `B’ and still meet all the technical and logical compliance requirements of the original location.
The only possible issue could be the human, psychological problem of squaring such technical and logical compliance with the notion of `physical location’. Terremark was not alone in finding why such a capability could be important. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami earlier this year created a situation where several service providers considered it expedient to move customer environments from Japanese datacentres to facilities in the USA. Such occurrences are, thankfully rare, but amply demonstrate the need for a pragmatic view of issues such as compliance, particularly when it comes to the issue of physical location.
Bailey indicated that the company also has some experience of the compliance issues that underpin such a move.
“ We have a good deal of knowledge of working with both SOX (the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations) and the Japanese implementation of them, J-SOX. ”
The Cloud Switch acquisition is unlikely to be the last, though Bailey was not to be drawn on what might be next. The closest to a hint was an enigmatic smile at the suggestion that industrial-strength application mashup tools would make a sensible addition to the portfolio as it looks to expand the range of core support services it has available for users looking to move to the Cloud .
The primary route the company will take to meet this need, however, is through partnerships. Bailey sees the Cloud as the fulfilment of the slogan promulgated some 20 years ago by Sun Microsystems’ founder and CEO, Scott McNealy. `The Network is the Computer’ may have seemed far-fetched back then but, as Bailey pointed out, everyone is now rushing in that direction:
"The Cloud is now the new IT delivery model, and that is why partnerships are important. The Cloud has consolidated the technology stack and made it simple. But we need the expertise of partners to now build the services users will need on top of that. ”
The Schiphol NAP itself represents a significant share of the $2bn-plus that Verizon has now spent in Cloud space. Bailey suggests the Terremark Division is targeting 189% growth this year in a marketplace where enterprise consumption of Cloud resources is expected to create some $90bn growth in market opportunity over next 4 years. This will be helped by the gap between business and IT finally disappearing.
The 25,000 square foot NAP facility is actually inside the boundary of Schiphol Airport, which therefore gives it a head start on new business. The first customer is set to be the airport authority itself. In addition the airport and surrounding area is still growing as an industrial and commercial development, as well as already having many major enterprises located there.
Although it is expected to consume 46MW of power when fully built out, Terremark is already working with the Airport Authority on ways to offset the energy consumption. One idea here is certainly different, and exploits the ready availability of water in the vicinity. This is to use waste heat extracted by the air-conditioning systems to propagate the growth of algae in ponds, which will then be harvested and turned into bio-fuel.
tags for Compliance problems? Create a virtual country like Verizon!
