News

posted on 06 August 2008 11:00

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Telco AT&T is sticking its head in the clouds and aiming to offer online server and storage services.

With the unlikely acronym of ASH - AT&T Synaptic Hosting - AT&T will base its offering on five super Internet data centers (IDCs) it gained when it acquired USinternetworking in 2006.

The super IDCs will be located in Piscataway, N.J.; San Diego; Annapolis, Md.; Singapore and Amsterdam and will act as regional gateways to the AT&T network cloud. They will support large-scale computing and applications on demand via virtualized servers and storage and deliver services across AT&T's IDC hosting infrastructure. Over time, additional IDCs will be added to the regional network infrastructure to deliver enterprise-class cloud capabilities to companies in the U.S. and abroad.

Customers will have access to a virtualized pool of server and storage resources with a pay-as-you-use service model. No prices are available.

There will be a single end-to-end, service-level agreement that is unique within the industry, AT&T claims. The company says that, compared to running applications in their own data centers, customers will gain greater flexibility, improved performance and cost savings.

Ron Spears, group president for AT&T Global Business Services, said: "The AT&T global network, combined with our powerful computing platform, is driving the convergence of networking and hosting services in ways that are allowing companies to deliver end-user applications whenever and wherever they are needed — while paying only for the capacity actually used."

In a dig at interrupted services from other vendors, he added: "In today's business environment, this kind of flexibility and cost benefit is urgently needed by companies that need their Web sites and end-user applications to perform flawlessly."

Eat your heart out Amazon. AT&T is coming to the rescue of your customers.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}