While some vendors have whitewashed the term cloud, Verizon Terremark is not one of them. Verizon Terremark offers managed hosting, co-location servers as well as cloud servers as part of its technology services portfolio. Helping to lead the technical direction for Verizon Terremark’s cloud efforts is Chief Technology Officer John Considine.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Considine explains why his company has built its own cloud technologies while still choosing to be interoperable with other cloud technologies, including the open-source OpenStack cloud platform.
Considine said that cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology offers an orchestrated virtualization system where customers can provision compute, storage and networking technologies, on demand. In his view, the big transition from managed hosting services to the cloud is the level of integration and automation.
Verizon Terremark in the last two years has been building a new cloud platform to address the fundamental challenge of scale. It’s an effort that includes Verizon Terremark’s own virtualization hypervisor, software-defined networking (SDN) and storage stacks.
Many in the cloud industry have decided to go the open-source route and build cloud services on top of open-source technologies, including CloudStack and OpenStack, but those solutions just don’t fit the bill for Considine.
“Some of our customers want us to be compatible with OpenStack, so if they do on-premises work for the cloud, they can connect,” Considine said. “There is a misperception that you have to be running the entire OpenStack to be compatible.”
To that end, Verizon Terremark is currently building in compatibility for OpenStack APIs to enable a degree of inter-cloud interoperability.
“When you think about true global scale-out cloud providers, there is a whole different set of challenges about how to develop, manage and deploy the infrastructure,” Considine said.
Watch the full video interview with John Considine, CTO of Verizon Terremark, below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.