A subsidiary of the NTT Group, NTT Communications announced its enterprise cloud by way of data centers in Hong Kong and Japan in June 2012. It was billed as “the world’s first cloud service to incorporate OpenFlow,” according to a news release. OpenFlow is a protocol for separating packet forwarding from routing decisions, which can be moved from a switch to a different controller. Such separation has the potential to lower the cost of equipment and create interoperable gear that would allow buyers to program their network infrastructure without resorting to proprietary and complex programming options created by the networking gear vendor.

Since last June, data centers in California, Virginia and Singapore have joined the NTT Communications lineup, and facilities in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand will come online in March, according to a news release.

The new data centers will also use software-defined networking to give NTT and its clients more agility and lower costs. Implementing network virtualization in the data centers enables more flexible and automated configuration changes to the network connecting a customer’s servers, even across multiple data centers, according to a presentation NTT Communications executive Yukio Ito gave at last year’s Open Networking Summit.

NTT isn’t completely new to SDN. Last year it was named as a customer of Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported. The company was using Nicira controllers to move data sets from data center to data center following the earthquake off the Japanese coast that triggered a tsunami and led to subsequent nuclear accidents.

While NTT is making a statement with its expansion of SDN-enabled data centers, other companies that run colocation or cloud facilities for enterprises, such as Rackspace and AT&T, could follow suit with similar offerings soon. After all, both of those companies are also Nicira customers, and hosting companies are popular targets for SDN deployments.

In any case, the rush to deploy software-defined networking in production environments will continue, especially after such a large vendor has gone public. Stacey predicted last month that 2013 would be the year big companies will see that their efforts to prevent network-hardware commoditization are doomed to fail.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user bandarji.

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There have been persistent rumors of rPath being for sale, according to cloud industry insiders. The company has had some recent braindrain and also has been perceived as a company that was ahead of the curve. It had raised $32.5 million in four rounds of funding. The company was started by former Red Hat employees and has seen some management turnover that had left the company on thin ice. However, it refocused its operations to get some growth. In a recent news release, rPath CEO Michael Torto boasted:

The company closed the first half of 2012 with 174 percent bookings growth over the same period last year. The company points to heightened demand for “enterprise PaaS” and active reseller relationships as the source of growth. “Over the last four quarters, we’ve seen a very positive shift in the market for cloud automation.”

In other words, this was as good a time for the investors to encourage the sale of the company. Both rPath and SAS have not responded to our queries and we will update the post as we get more information.

Update: On Friday, November 30,  SAS said it was acquiring the assets of Rpath. Terms were not disclosed. In a statement, SAS CTO Keith Collins said:

“By acquiring rPath’s key technology and industry knowledge, we will expand our commitment to the virtual applications and appliances space on a global enterprise level. In addition, we will further enhance our ability to build and deliver SAS solutions, such as SAS High Performance Analytics, in a cloud environment. This is a great fit for SAS and we’re excited to have employees of rPath join our team.”

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Virtustream’s xStream cloud platform is designed for mission-critical and heavy-duty enterprise applications such as SAP. The company touts big-name customers such as Pizza Hut, Domino Sugar and Intel, as well as gaming startup Digital Chocolate. Recently, Virtustream upped its enterprise (and government) appeal by announcing FISMA Moderate certification, a designation that underscores the cloud’s security protocol, even if FISMA is only applicable (and with regard to cloud computing, questionably so) to government agencies.

There is plenty competition for those enterprise cloud workloads, though, including from Amazon Web Services, Terremark/Verizon, IBM, GoGrid, Tier 3 and the entire VMware vCloud ecosystem. To its credit, Virtustream is striving to distinguish itself with a consumption-based pricing scheme as well as a mix of public, private and virtual private offerings. The company recently bought cloud computing pioneer Enomaly in order to work its SpotCloud technology into a federated platform for letting Virtustream customers buy and sell excess capacity among one another.

There isn’t a lot of money floating around to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service companies — it’s a capital-intensive business compared to software as a service, and the competition is both established and huge — so Virtustream’s ability to keep raising money is indicative of its promise. It will have to keep on its toes, though, because there’s no shortage of innovation in the cloud world, and everyone is working overtime on features to lure in those lucrative enterprise customers.

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In March, HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that HP will offer its own Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and cloud storage services, some of the details of which were leaked last month. When I spoke today with Patrick Harr, HP’s VP of cloud solutions, he acknowledged those services are coming this summer and explained they’ll primarily target developers and will compete with AWS.

There will, of course, be an HP spin on the services, which is that they’ll utilize some of HP’s expertise in security and availability, and will be integrated with HP’s overall cloud portfolio. According to Harr, that could mean many things, including being available through HP’s hybrid-cloud management software as a resource option for low-priority applications. At Structure 2011, we’ll discuss a number of efforts to make public cloud computing and storage  more palatable for important applications and data, and HP sounds like it might help drive those use cases. But make no mistake, HP intends to offer a pure cloud play without the trappings of legacy infrastructure.

Harr acknowledges this is new ground for HP, but his experience tells him that HP can actually be competitive with developer-first cloud providers like AWS. For one, Harr, who previously served as CEO of cloud storage pioneer Nirvanix, thinks that scale will be a driving factor in determining which providers fare the best when providing commodity services such as simple compute and storage. And while he said that Nirvanix had to adopt an enterprise focus to differentiate because it couldn’t buy disk drives for less than Amazon could, that’s not the case with HP.

But winning developers will also require institutional buy-in from HP to prove that it’s not the stodgy, slow-moving vendor that many make it out to be. Harr said he questioned whether HP was ready for such a move when he came, but that progress has been fairly rapid in spreading the web-first principles to the other aspects of HP’s cloud strategy. Additionally, he said the cloud services business is operating much like its own business, which allows it the freedom to bring in the right people and pursue its own agenda without getting too caught up in legacy bureaucracy.

The highlights of today’s HP cloud news are CloudAgile — a service aimed at helping service providers build and offer cloud services — and CloudSystem: a preconfigured platform composed of converged infrastructure and cloud-management software. When used in unison, customers will be able to build and manage their application architectures via what appears to be a fairly intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and then scale out by adding external resources from HP’s CloudAgile program or from on-premise resource pools.

HP is touting choice throughout the process, as CloudSystem supports a variety of hypervisors, operating systems and applications, and early CloudAgile partners include Verizon, Savvis and OpSource.

As I said when Apotheker announced his grand cloud-provider plans, though, I’ll believe HP can compete in wooing developers when I see it. We know HP can deliver private clouds and advanced cloud management for large enterprises, but despite saying all the right things, it doesn’t have a reputation on which to hang its developer-friendly hat. If HP does pull it off, it’ll be like the Wild West with HP, AWS, Rackspace and several other providers shooting it out for market dominance and, hopefully, making the cloud space even more interesting.

Image courtesy of Flickr user uwdigitalcollections.

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