Telstra’s second shot at cloud

Cisco’s Intercloud is built on technology the vendor already uses to manage its own WebEx Squared workloads, among others, allowing for a fairly aggressive roadmap.

Telstra already has racks being installed running the Intercloud software - specifically Red Hat’s version of OpenStack with Cisco’s management layer running over the top.

The next job is for Cisco and Telstra to build the necessary layers for the service to be commercially multi-tenant. By late May and early June, Yarkoni hopes to offer a platform in Alpha state, with customers being asked to “run  some workloads and hammer the alpha environment” for stability while Telstra builds the billing interfaces to sit atop it.

In the latter part of 2014 Telstra will offer a beta service to customers for dev and test use, with the billing service now live, with full production ready before the close of the year.

Yarkoni agrees that its an aggressive timeline, but counts on Cisco and Red Hat to bring the necessary skills to the table to get the job done in a timely fashion.

I asked him if there were enough skills around OpenStack in Australia to do the job.

“That’s a great question,” he said. “Our aim is to build this with Australian hands, provide Australian support but use global R&D. I believe we will find the skills, if not [our partners] will import them.”

What does it mean for existing customers?

While the final deal is yet to be inked, its expected Telstra will have Cisco’s Intercloud exclusively in Australia for somewhere between one to two years.

Initially, Telstra intends to continue to offer its existing VMware-based ‘Cloud Services’ stack to customers as Intercloud builds up momentum. Yarkoni wasn’t keen to commit to its future development.

“We will respect all existing contracts, and support the features and functions of the last version [CSX],” he said. “And we’ll continue to actively sell it to customers that require dedicated hosting but want to run it on utility infrastructure.

“Over time, what I expect to be a journey of a couple of years, customers will either choose to - or we will help them - migrate to OpenStack with KVM or even with VMware if you have to. We’ll have all sorts of other flavours of cloud underneath.”

Yarkoni agrees that supporting multiple hypervisors or cloud architectures comes at a cost to Telstra. The beauty of OpenStack is that Telstra - and in turn its customers - will be able to choose whether or not to pay VMware's software licensing fees or use a freely available option. Yarkoni said that if Telstra gets the service management layer right, what sits beneath will be less of an issue.

“If you walk into an Amazon data centre, you will find different versions of what Amazon considered their standard compute over time. But it all still works. Similarly, at some point, Apple decided to put Intel chips in laptops. It didn’t especially matter that you used a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, or that your computer came with one chip or another. Apple decided the economies of scale using Intel chips was better than designing their own.”

For that reason, cloud services built on Cisco’s Intercloud are likely to be branded ‘Telstra Cloud Services’ just as existing services are today.

A new service, and a new customer proposition

Yarkoni hopes that the Intercloud deal will bring about one key architectural difference between existing Telstra cloud services and those that will be on offer by the end of the year.

“Today, the elasticity we call ‘cloud’ exists only up to the edge of the data centre,” he said. “Where it needs to work is all the way to the edgepoint device where a customer consumes a service.

“What we have had to do in the past is to build a service layer that allowed us to address firewalling, routing, VPN, private networks, service instantiation, and all the move adds, and changes associated with those network issues. What we intend to build now is a service that automates this all the way to the customer.”

Telstra is also looking to incorporate network APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow a customer’s application hosted on the Telstra cloud to adjust the size and quality of the network pipe required.

“It would be ideal to say to customers: for certain apps, you no longer have to plan to a peak network capacity. You can have the app ask for capacity on the go. Or you can schedule a batch job to only run during off-peak rates.”

The Intercloud deal will - if customers subscribe at scale - elevate Telstra as a service management and IT operations channel.

“If we have the tools, and the people with a DevOps mindset, we can drive better economies of scale and operational excellence,” Yarkoni said. “We can bring the promise and elasticity of cloud without Telstra or the customer needing to over-invest in capital or planning for peaks.

“Then we can graduate conversations with our customers - how do you deliver that to my applications, the IT that supports my business? Sometimes that is a SaaS conversation, other times it is about bringing elasticity to the application - we pre-configure the infrastructure such that it becomes the click of a button in a catalogue.”