NTT Expands IaaS Services Geography and Advertise SDN

NTT Communications has announced a significant expansion in the geography of cloud computing services. We are talking about IaaS (infrastructure as a service), SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service). Now these services will be available to customers outside of Asia. In addition, NTT Communications plans to expand the number of its data centers, on the basis of which the above services will be provided. But this is not only about geographical expansion - the company is increasingly introducing the concepts of software-defined networks (Software-Defined Network; SDN) and software-defined data centers (Software-Defined Data Center; SDDC).

A subsidiary of the Japanese NTT Group announced the start of providing cloud-based data processing services based on its data centers in Hong Kong and Japan back in June 2012. According to the official press release, the new product has become “the first cloud service in the world with OpenFlow support.” Note that OpenFlow is a protocol for managing the processing of information transmitted over a data network by routers and switches. This protocol allows you to implement a software-defined network technology. OpenFlow technology enables access to network devices for simplified programming using a standard interface. Potentially, this approach allows you to reduce the cost of equipment and create OpenFlow-compatible systems and products whose customers can program their network infrastructure without resorting to proprietary and sophisticated software created by network equipment providers.

In a recent press release by a Japanese company, it has been said that since June last year NTT Communications has added data centers to its portfolio in the United States (California and Virginia) and Singapore. In March, facilities in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand will be commissioned. Founded in 1999, NTT Communications provides intercity and international communications services, and also manages 131 data centers around the world.

All new data centers of the company will use software-defined networks, which will give NTT Communications and its customers more flexibility and opportunities to further reduce costs. At the Open Networking Summit conference last year, NTT Communications representative, Yukio Ito, noted that implementing network virtualization in the company's data centers allows creating mechanisms for automated reconfiguration of networks connecting client servers, even if server clusters of a specific company are dispersed in several data centers.
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NTT is not new to the SDN sector. Last year, she began using Nicira's Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) software in her data centers. This scalable software platform allows you to create a distributed infrastructure of virtual networks in cloud data centers. Such infrastructure is completely abstracted from physical network equipment. NTT Communications has announced the transition to the Nicira platform after an earthquake off the coast of Japan, which caused a tsunami and led to a subsequent nuclear disaster. The cataclysms showed all the flaws of the physical network equipment.

Other large companies, such as Rackspace and AT & T, which provide cloud data processing services and rent space for hosting server equipment to their customers, may follow the example of the Japanese. In the end, both companies mentioned above are also Nicira's clients and are actively engaged in the deployment of SDN. In any case, the expansion of software-defined networks will continue, especially after other NTT-level service providers announce their transition to this technology.