T-Systems, the business division of Deutsche Telekom (DT), will begin this month to offer public cloud services to businesses of all sizes. T-Systems has deployed Cisco’s Intercloud nodes into its data centers in Germany for a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering named DSI Intercloud.
Cisco first announced it was working with DT on Intercloud in September 2014.
T-Systems says DSI Intercloud complies with all German data sovereignty laws. It will be available for companies of all sizes to order compute, storage, and networking services in a pay-as-you-go model through a Web portal. The service will be available without minimum purchase requirements or contract periods.
T-Systems already offers private cloud services to businesses, but DT “intends to compete more fiercely with companies like Google and Amazon in the future,” as its press release states. Overall, DT aims to double its cloud revenue by the end of 2018. The company intends to roll out platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings in the first half of 2016.
Data security company Covata, which participated in a pilot test of the platform, will be the first customer to use the DSI Intercloud infrastructure services. Separately, the communications company Unify is interested in an open source cloud platform from Germany and has been testing the new service in DT’s data centers.
Huawei and Abraxas
In other European cloud news, Abraxas, a cloud service provider in Switzerland, announced today that it has built a virtualized, multitenant, cloud data center network with Huawei’s cloud fabric architecture.
Abraxas wanted its data center network to be flexible enough to evolve into a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture. Huawei’s cloud fabric uses its own CloudEngine series data center switches. The vendor builds the fabric using Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (Trill) and an Ethernet virtual network across Layer 2.
Huawei’s cloud fabric implements 1:N virtualization of a core switch, and Abraxas is able to implement a variety of service functions using different virtual switches. Huawei’s switches work with its own controller.
According to Huawei, its cloud fabric has been deployed in more than 1,000 data centers for companies including Telefónica, Alibaba, and Tencent.