Amazon Cloud Journal on Ulitzer

AT&T said Monday that it will turn on its Amazon-like global Synaptic Compute as a Service later this quarter and target the scalable on-demand computing capacity at companies of all sizes.

Since it's at the recruiting poster phase, AT&T has yet to divulge what the EC2-like service will cost.

The widgetry is based on Sun's Open Cloud Platform, Sun's APIs and its cloud reference architecture; VMware and its vCloud API; and the AT&T-class security of its own network and management.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz imagines AT&T's public cloud being connected to VMware-spun private clouds. Sun, on its sick bed, is understandably thrilled.

AT&T said the service will be deployed in the US and initially restricted to customers located in the US. Eventually it will open cloud centers offshore.

It said to expect a web portal to order, provision and manage server capacity, or program the APIs; multiple storage options; round-the-clock monitoring by AT&T support teams; Three9s availability SLAs; and a monthly bill that can be paid with a credit card.

On offer will be anywhere from one to 20 virtual servers per AT&T Internet Data Center (IDC); default Internet access or, alternately, private networking; firewall services, with one firewall policy per customer; one virtual LAN per customer; and a template library to build server images (including operating system images for Windows and Linux).

Users will be able to set up a small server (one CPU and 4GB of memory); a medium server (two CPUs and 8GB of memory); or a larger server (four CPUs and 16GB of memory) and get 100GB of storage for each server image (on the same virtual infrastructure in the same IDC). They can also can buy up to 2TB additional disk storage per virtual server or connect to AT&T S3-like Synaptic Storage as a Service.

AT&T said APIs will let users design a custom cloud computing management interface; enable additional authentication for specific server images; and create customized reporting.

Like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Synaptic is the name of AT&T's umbrella strategy for creating hybrid public and private cloud platforms.

In a statement AT&T said, "By unifying - also known as ‘federating' - with the AT&T service, customers will be able to seamlessly manage all their IT resources across the enterprise and develop applications all from one location and move application workloads where and when they are needed. Customers will be able to handle their business needs all in the same way whether they will be running internally in their own datacenter or in AT&T's cloud."

See http://www.synaptic.att.com.