NTT Com adds OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and bare metal option to global cloud service

Japan will see the new Enterprise Cloud features first, followed later this year by the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong, the company said Tuesday.

NTT Communications is the international networking and IT services subsidiary of Japanese telecommunications giant NTT, and Enterprise Cloud is the brand it uses for a variety of hosted services.

The company has been testing a couple of open-source tools, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, in its Cloud n hosting service at home in Japan, and now intends to roll them out to Enterprise Cloud users around the world. It boosted its European capacity last March with the US$840 million acquisition of hosting company e-shelter.

OpenStack will give NTT Communications customers an industry-standard API for automated control of their workloads in the public cloud, while Cloud Foundry will provide the basis for its platform-as-a-service offering, allowing customers to deploy applications on OpenStack within NTT's cloud, or with other infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Amazon Web Services.

Rolling out these open-source platforms to international customers will increase the appeal of Enterprise Cloud for dev-ops and agile shops that have traditionally been better served at NTT by Cloud n, with its narrower geographical focus, and will allow the company to better compete with offerings from the likes of Google, Microsoft, AWS or RackSpace on a global basis.

On the private cloud side, NTT is now offering bare-metal servers with hypervisor options including VMware's vSphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V as part of Enterprise Cloud.

It is also beefing up its internal network architecture, to bring public and private clouds closer together. This will allow enterprise customers to replicate on-premises computing environments in the hosted private cloud where necessary for security or licensing reasons, and to cut the need for server reconfiguration by putting public and hosted private cloud components in the same network segment, the company said. Within its data centers, the company offers a free 10Gbps closed network, while connectivity between data centers is provided by NTT's global carrier infrastructure, either free or at low cost, it said.

Finally, NTT Communications is launching its own cloud management platform to unify control of its own public and hybrid cloud services and those of AWS, Microsoft Azure and other providers. NTT began rolling out direct connectivity between its cloud and those of AWS and Azure last August.

The company isn't finished adding new features. In a future update to its cloud offering, it is also dangling the promise of SAP HANA cloud integration.