GE Healthcare’s managed private cloud
Patrick Weeks, senior director digital operations, GE Digital (the arm of GE responsible for its healthcare business) told the conference that GE Digital had migrated more than 500 applications — 42 per cent of its application infrastructure — to a cloud environment over the past two years, and had put a significant number into a managed OpenStack based private cloud service provided by Rackspace.
“We needed to be able to access internal applications,” he said. “You can do that from public cloud, but it is very complex. Putting in private hosted simplifies the journey. And when you have 200+ controls and security compliances, there is nothing like to having a private hosted, single-tenant environment to be able to host application for your most sensitive data.”
Bryce told the conference that private managed cloud had emerged as a significant new consumption model for cloud services: “Private cloud delivered as a service with the infrastructure located either on the customer’s premises, or elsewhere, is gaining traction,” he said.
“We have launched a new category in the OpenStack marketplace to capture the remotely managed private cloud offerings that are out there. I think we are going to see more of these over the coming year.”
Verizon rolls out OpenStack-based SDN
Beth Cohen, distinguished member of the technical staff at Verizon told the conference how Verizon had developed its software defined network offering using OpenStack in the cloud and to run the virtualised CPE for the service.
“Two years ago Verizon announced its SDN strategy and my team was asked to deliver products to realise that strategy,” she said. “Customers wanted software defined WAN routing, WAN optimisation and a whole portfolio of other network services, and we wanted to automate service delivery.”
She said OpenStack had been the obvious choice for these services. “OpenStack offered standardized management tools and a common platform that vendors could work with making integration easy. We also had common robust APIs and OpenStack had familiar tools we could use.”
She said Verizon had created a massively distributed OpenStack implementation enabling the same management tools to be used across the entire network and enabling the network to be scaled up to “thousands or millions of notes all powered by OpenStack.”
Cohen said Verizon had used OpenStack to build a global data centre based platform delivered all around the world supporting both internal and external customers and “universal CPE – OpenStack in a box.”
“Automation and orchestration have given us the tools to do fast changes from a central portal,” Cohen said. “We have automated ordering and provisioning, which allows customers to change service levels, sizes and features from a single portal.”
The author attended the OpenStack summit as a guest of the OpenStack Foundation