NTT Communications' Enterprise Cloud goes global

NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Group (NYSE: NTT), today announced the global availability of the NTT Communications Enterprise Cloud, its virtualised infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, with the availability of data centres in the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia-Pacific. NTT Com launched its ground-breaking software-defined networking (SDN)-based Enterprise Cloud via data centres in Japan and Hong Kong in June 2012. The addition of data centres in Singapore, Virginia and California, in the US, and England makes the Enterprise Cloud available on a global basis. NTT Com anticipates opening three more data centres in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand in March 2013, to further enhance global coverage.

Since launching Enterprise Cloud last year, NTT Com has gained clients and seen strong interest from global enterprises that view Enterprise Cloud as a flexible extension of their own data centres, enabling them to connect existing private networks to the cloud and gain additional cost-optimised and secure compute capacity. As a global provider with multiple data centre locations, NTT Com is able to offer clients cloud-based services where they need them most, while enhancing self-management and maintaining single, minimal-resource contracts with single-support contact.

"NTT Com understands the enterprise client, their struggles, goals and needs," said Motoo Tanaka, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services at NTT Com. "Being truly enterprise class is what makes NTT Com the leading partner of choice for client cloud transformation through comprehensive cloud life cycle services, and is what has led us to develop this real-world cloud, built on a foundation of advisory, migration, operational and management services." To illustrate the benefits, Tanaka spoke about four clients already using the Enterprise Cloud platform:

* One manufacturer realised dramatic results after integrating systems to the cloud that had become scattered as a result of rapid globalisation: From 1 700 servers to 500 servers and 500 virtual machines; from 200 locations with an on-premise system to 50; and from 20 network carriers to one.

* A global retailer looking to support rapid business growth due to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and geographic expansion moved from separate procurement of servers and data centres to a single information and communications technology (ICT) platform using 50% fewer network carriers, with integrated management and uniform services for newly launched stores throughout the world.

* A large media company seeking to strengthen business continuity planning (BCP) and business efficiency was able to reduce its over-concentration of data centres in one metropolis and total cost of ownership (TCO) for ICT systems by migrating from a system with 500 servers to an integrated platform using cloud hosting and 90 servers.

* Another retailer growing rapidly due to M&A needed to reduce IT costs and sought to benefit from centralised operations; it did so by exchanging its ICT assets (including 500 servers) for cloud hosting, reducing its data centres from five to one and realising system optimisation through an integrated customer portal.

* A second manufacturer aiming to outsource its ICT assets, achieve greater ICT resource flexibility and reduce its CO2 footprint transitioned from an overall system of 1 500 virtual and physical servers scattered among multiple data centres to an entirely cloud-based platform.

"NTT Communications' Enterprise Cloud is a full-layer, self-manageable virtual private cloud that is now global, and is growing to incorporate virtualised networks in eight countries and nine locations by March 2013," said Tanaka.

Working with enterprises looking to move to the cloud and optimise ICT systems, NTT Com provides advisory services to identify the appropriate applications and any business processes affected; migration services in which NTT Com leverages technologies to migrate existing applications and their underlying data to the cloud; and operational and management services where NTT Com provides ongoing IaaS support. Driving the overall value proposition is the unification of virtual network and virtual server technology.

NTT Com uses virtualisation technologies for both compute and network resources, including Openflow standards for its path-breaking virtualisation of the network. Having launched Enterprise Cloud in 2012 as the world's first cloud service to incorporate Openflow, the open source protocol that enables SDN, NTT Com has continued to leverage this technology to reduce network complexity, which saves on costs and time in ways that help clients. Providing the necessary connections within and between NTT Com's data centres, SDN technology enables upward and downward-scalable bandwidth on demand (BoD), a key to offering recovery as a service (RaaS), and provides a portal for customers to view and use globally distributed data centres as a single pool of resources.

The aggressive adoption of SDN, combined with NTT Com's unmatched global assets and experience in the world of enterprise colocation, managed hosting, on- and off-premise equipment, data centres, public and private networks and cloud technology, distinguish Enterprise Cloud from other platforms with less depth or breadth. That combination of technology, experience and assets drives the primary features of Enterprise Cloud:

* Global solutions: With service in eight countries (nine locations) by March 2013, Enterprise Cloud offers seamless global linkage, supported by global data backup, meeting the needs of multinational businesses, especially those with strategic developments in Asia-Pacific.

* Cost optimisation: Clients architect their clouds according to need, enabling just the right resources to be utilised and pay-per-use invoicing.

* Flexibility and scalability: Clients have 100% guaranteed compute resources and can begin with as little as 1GHz CPU, 50GB storage and 1GB memory, increasing incrementally to meet their overall requirements. With SDN/Openflow, BoD allows for faster backups.

* Simplicity: An SDN-driven portal gives clients a single dashboard to obtain real-time resource use; to configure virtual machines, firewalls and load balancers; and to make other add/modify/delete (AMD) changes without opening a support ticket.

* Free access to service: Clients who use NTT Com's Arcstar Universal One, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS)-based virtual private network (VPN), which reaches more than 140 secure data centres worldwide, gain access to the Enterprise Cloud over this connection without charge.

* High availability: NTT Communications' Enterprise Cloud features service level agreements (SLAs) of 99.99% availability and advanced security through a variety of options.

For details about services, please visit www.ntt.com/enterprise_cloud. NTT Com, under its Global Cloud Vision announced in October 2011, is leveraging its strengths as a telecoms operator to provide total ICT outsourcing services, from networks and data centres, to applications, all on a seamless, end-to-end, one-stop basis, to meet customer needs for cloud-based ICT systems.

Supporting resources

NTT Communications Corporation: www.ntt.com
NTT America: www.us.ntt.com
NTT Com Asia: www.hk.ntt.com
NTT Europe: www.eu.ntt.com
NTT Singapore: www.sg.ntt.com
NTT Communications Global Cloud Vision: www.ntt.com/global-ict/
NTT Communications Enterprise Cloud Web site: www.ntt.com/enterprise_cloud
NTT Communications Blog: www.nttcom.tv

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