Deutsche Telekom (DT) hasn’t announced this one yet, but the German communications giant is getting into the cloud multi-sourcing business. The website for two new services is already live: they’re called NetAnalyze and NetOptimize, and the focus seems to be on content delivery.
While public cloud services, including content delivery networks (CDNs), are usually very reliable, no one is perfect. Outages happen, and as a result some companies find themselves looking into multi-cloud strategies to ensure redundancy (and to optimize performance and cost). The issue is that cloud costs and resource allocation are complex — hence the emergence of a new breed of cloud mediation services such as Rightscale and Cedexis.
DT is preparing two complementary services in this space. The first is NetAnalyze, which draws on the billion network measurements that DT’s “community” takes every day, spanning 32,000 networks in 230 countries. Webmasters can put the NetAnalyze tag on their site and visiting customers will then automatically generate anonymized measurement for metrics like throughput and response time.
Then NetOptimize kicks in. When a customer requests the website from wherever they are located, NetOptimize will use the NetAnalyze metrics to determine which provider will deliver the content most quickly, and automatically route the content accordingly. Pricing for this load-balancing service is pay-per-use. The result, in theory, is better performance and lower risk of outages, and also better price-to-performance ratios, given the ability to hop between different providers according to needs.
DT’s website also touts the fact that such multi-sourcing approaches make it easier to avoid vendor lock-in. The company says NetAnalyze and NetOptimize make it possible to “form a unified strategy across multiple platforms (cloud, data center or CDN)”.
A glance at the NetOptimize portal (which appears to default to Japanese, at least from my end) shows that the service covers numerous clouds and CDNs. On the cloud side, we have locations for Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, InstaCompute, Internap AgileCLOUD, Joyent, PhoenixNAP, Profitbricks, Rackspace Cloud, Softlayer and Windows Azure. For CDN, there’s Akamai, Azure, BitGravity, CacheFly, CDN77, CDNetworks, CDNVideo, ChinaCache, ChinaNetCenter, CloudFlare, Cloudfront, Edgecast, Fastly, Fastweb, Highwinds, Internap AgileCAST, Internode, Level3, Limelight, NetDNA, Ngenix, OnApp, Pacnet, UPX CloudCache and Yacast.
I’ve asked DT for further details of the service, such as when they intend to officially take the wraps off it, and will add their response when I get it.
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