Autumn saw providers of both private and public cloud-based services expand their offerings, global market reach and sales.

A Sun executive at a Silicon Valley industry event suggested that the outsourced private cloud model may be the most financially sound one among all the ways in which an organisation can use cloud computing, while NetApp’s chief executive officer, Tom Georgens, said at another Silicon Valley conference that the jury was still out on both the security and financial advantages of the cloud.

The internal enterprise cloud model appeals to large companies of the Fortune 100 caliber, but such clouds are expensive to build and operate, said Sun’s senior director for cloud strategy and corporate development, Krishna Subramanian. The model will not yield economies of scale possible with the hosted private cloud or the public cloud models.

“At Sun, we believe that the hosted private cloud model is going to be a big trend going forward,” she said. The model alleviates security and compliance concerns associated with public cloud services, while still allowing for the savings outsourcing provides.

NetApp’s Georgens said at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s summit in October that two fundamental questions about cloud computing still had not been settled: will it really save money, and how secure is it?

“I ask people all the time: why would anybody run their own Microsoft Exchange environment anymore?” Georgens asked. “What value could an IT organisation bring to an application like that?”

The primary response by NetApp customers that do run their own email remains the same: security.

Caveates aside, Georgens said savings promised by cloud computing were attractive enough and many companies were moving toward more shared architectures.

Despite the doubts, adoption of cloud computing marches on, as more and more companies attempt to gain efficiency by using shared infrastructures – public, in-house, or both.

AT&T announced in mid-October the expansion of its portfolio of cloud-based services by adding an on-demand compute capacity offering.

Expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2009, it will feature a web-based interface, pay-as-you-go billing structure and multiple storage options for use with the existing Synaptic Storage offering. AT&T said there would be no up-front fees, long-term obligations or early-termination penalties.

UNDER THE UMBRELLA
Synaptic is the umbrella brand for all of AT&T’s cloud-based services – storage and hosting being the existing ones.

The company partnered with VMware and Sun to develop its newest offering. Synaptic Compute as a Service is using VMware’s vSphere hypervisor and vCloud API. It incorporates Sun’s Open Cloud Platform and its Cloud API’s cloud reference architecture.

AT&T will deploy the service in the US, but it will be accessible from anywhere through the internet. Future global expansion plans are in place.

The announcement puts AT&T in a better position to compete with Amazon Web Services – perhaps the most well-known public cloud provider, offering as a service everything from compute to storage to database.

ASIA IN EXPANSION FOR AMAZON
Amazon said in October that it would expand its infrastructure into Asia-Pacific, starting with several locations in Singapore in the first half of 2010.

The company said the expansion was necessary to enable its customers to deploy compute and storage capacity in proximity of their clients located in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Developers and businesses located in Asia, as well as those with a multinational presence, have been eager for Asia-based infrastructure to minimise latency and optimise performance,” AWS vice president Adam Selipsky said in a statement. “We’re very excited to announce the expansion of AWS infrastructure into Asia to help our customers plan their technology investments and better serve their end-users in Asia.”

The initial rollout of services supported by infrastructure deployed in Singapore will include Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Relational Database Service, Simple Queue Service, Elastic MapReduce and CloudFront.

CUSTOMERS START TO CLIMB ABROAD
Google announced a landmark deal with global hygiene firm Rentokil Initial, which signed to shift 20,000 users to Google Apps Premier Edition. The firm will move off 180 existing email domains and 40 mail systems running on six operating systems. Google also cited Motorola and car systems maker Valeo as cloud customers.

Meanwhile Fujitsu, which currently offers a cloud storage offering, said it would roll out a cloud-based server offering.

Terremark and Rackspace, two important players in the cloud space, both announced in November substantial growth in the amount of business their cloud computing offerings generated.

In the quarter ending 30 September, Terremark’s cloud computing business grew by more than 400% over the previous quarter.

Rackspace reported a more modest increase – about 15% quarter-over-quarter – but said its cloud computing business now represents 10% of its revenues, compared with 5% a year ago.

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This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine