Optus joins the private cloud

Optus’s business division and its subsidiary Alphawest today announced the launch of a new scalable commercial enterprise ‘cloud’ service — Optus Cloud Solutions — which will be available to enterprise customers from 1 October.

“Services are delivered via the Optus Evolve network and our secure datacentre facilities, giving businesses the added assurance that their data is in good hands,” said Rob Parcell, acting managing director, Optus Business.

The infrastructure is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and delivered through Optus’ ‘Evolve’ MPLS IP network. Optus Business is in partnership with the joint VMWare, Cisco and EMC technology platform to provide the cloud computing services.

The telecommunications giant will provide the the services as ‘slices’ — a typical slice would be 0.5GHz and 1GB RAM, at $125 per month. Two pricing tiers will also be on offer for storage on Optus cloud infrastructure - high performance storage at 60c per gigabyte, per month and 'economy' storage at 30c.

Additional services such as operating licenses and firewalls will incur additional costs. Optus was not able to comment on the details of the pricing structure for firewall and operating system services, however.

Clients will be able to use their own operating system of choice or choose from a master catalog of Microsoft operating systems, which will build licensing costs into the monthly bill.

The service is scalable and customer’s administrators will be scale it up and down as they see fit through Optus’ self-service browser-based portal. The portal will allow administrators to create, manage and use Virtual machines, catalogues, users and groups.

“Optus Cloud Solutions have been designed to give customers the flexibility, agility and control to scale their IT services up and down in real time to support business requirements and fluctuations, without having to maintain their own infrastructure,” said Parcell. Service desk support will be on hand 24/7 — change and service management reports will also be available.

Optus’ cloud services beta was launched in the second week of February this year. Amongst the handful of enterprise customers to trial the service was Perth-based Curtin University of Technology and property services company Savills.

Curtin initially had some concerns that Optus’ Sydney-based data centre would cause noticeable latency, however it was found during the months’ long trial that this was not the case — latency averaged 60 milliseconds, far below expectations. Once the project goes live next month, Curtin will extend the cloud services to the International Centre for Radio Astronomy, hosted on campus.

“Researchers like to have the flexibility to manage their IT requirements based on a switch on, switch off basis. We see a real opportunity to provision bespoke environments for researchers so they can access computing on demand. This model could also be potentially extended to students as we progress along the cloud journey,” said Peter Nikoletatos, chief information officer of the university, in a statement.

Additional reporting by James Hutchinson

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