NTT To Offer Global IaaS Leveraging OpenFlow Technology

The Tokyo-based telecom giant initially is providing services from data centers in Japan and Hong Kong, but two U.S.-based data centers will follow later this year, with European and other Asian locations by next spring. Services go live June 29, according to NTT.

What NTT provides is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering called Enterprise Cloud, part of the broader NTT Communications cloud strategy that the company first rolled out last year.

Among specific services, NTT will offer free broadband connections to NTT's Arcstar Universal One network customers using NTT data centers, online backup, system optimization and management of server (CPU, memory, disk) and network resources, as well as managed security, an online portal for monitoring information and communications technology (ICT) costs, and consulting for cloud services deployment. The idea is that customers will be able to use NTT's global infrastructure as their ICT system, NTT said.

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Pricing is estimated based on IT needs, NTT said in a statement Monday.

NTT has been one of the more visible carrier supporters of OpenFlow, the software defined networking (SDN)-centric protocol that addresses packet routing on a software layer separate from the network's physical infrastructure.

Yukio Ito, senior vice president of service infrastructure for NTT Communications, told attendees at the Open Networking Summit in April that OpenFlow was creating new R&D opportunities for the networking industry and that NTT was examining how to deploy the technology more widely.