AT&T taps into HP cloud

By James Middleton

US carrier AT&T has added HP’s offerings to its network-enabled cloud ecosystem, allowing customers to use their VPN to connect to the HP Helion portfolio of cloud services.

AT&T said its NetBond tool creates a highly secure private path between a customer’s AT&T VPN and a cloud service provider, like HP, flexing and scaling network resources dynamically as a company’s cloud computing needs change.

The company claimed network elasticity which automatically flexes with the needs of the cloud service allow customers to save as much as 60 percent on networking costs. Moreover, the solution delivers as much as 50 per cent lower latency and three times the availability compared with the public internet, as well as isolating traffic from risks such as DDoS attacks.

“Business customers want high-speed connectivity and rock-solid security protecting vital data and applications in the cloud,” said Andy Geisse, CEO of AT&T Business Solutions. “With HP and other major cloud providers joining our growing NetBond ecosystem, we are leading the movement to make cloud computing more attractive for the many enterprise buyers who demand security, performance, flexibility and quality of service.”

Melanie Posey, analyst with IDC, said: “IDC’s research underscores the importance of the network dimension of cloud enablement and enterprises’ increasing interest in vendors that can deliver a more secure, optimised cloud solution.”

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In related news, HP has unveiled an open standards-based software-defined networking (SDN) virtualization tool. The HP Virtual Cloud Networking (VCN) SDN Application is an enhanced networking module of HP Helion Openstack, which delivers network virtualization enabled by SDN and claims to orchestrate the entire datacentre infrastructure.

The HP VCN claims automated delivery of secure isolated networks in minutes versus weeks as well as access to an open SDN ecosystem including HP and third party SDN applications.

The move will be of interest to enterprises, with HP using the example of a business the needs to move to a cloud-based Office solution and wants to deploy Office 365 in the company’s private cloud.  With traditional networks, although it is now commonplace to be able to bring up VMs and deploy servers and storage, when it comes to the network and services, complexity and network provisioning takes longer due to traditional network limitations.

But with the VCN SDN application, Office 365 can be deployed in minutes versus weeks over a virtual network, and can also be optimized and secured through SDN-enabled applications.