[LINK] Telstra cloud

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Telstra to sell virtual servers to small business owners 

"they could be custom-developed applications, or other off-the-shelf 
applications, that they can put on this infrastructure .."

by: Andrew Colley. From: The Australian November 08, 2011 12:00AM 
<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/cloud-computing/telstra-to-
sell-virtual-servers-to-small-business-owners/story-fn8lu7wm-
1226188095958?from=hot-topics-it> (snip)


TELSTRA has ramped up its cloud strategy with a new online ordering and 
management portal aimed at Australia's small and medium-sized businesses. 

The portal, which Telstra was putting through final testing yesterday, 
lets companies buy and manage virtual servers in the carrier's cloud.

Telstra's cloud product portfolio manager, Nick Gaul, said the portal 
would gradually replace a back-end-centric sales system that Telstra had 
been relying on to provide virtual servers to customers for the past year.

"The portal is trying to make it simpler to purchase these services," Mr 
Gaul said. "It lets us go through not only the buying process but also 
through to the usage."

The portal can be accessed from any internet connection. Telstra charges 
for network traffic to and from the servers.

Mr Gaul said the portal, which lets purchases be made through a shopping 
cart-style interface, would complement Telstra's T-Suite, which is 
underpinned by Microsoft's cloud-based office suite, Office 365. 

The virtual server is aimed at non-enterprise customers who do not have 
complex system configuration requirements and want to run their servers 
off-site.

"There can be other applications that don't have a natural software-as-a-
service fit, and they could be custom-developed applications or other off-
the-shelf applications that they can put on this infrastructure, and 
still get that server off the customer premise," Mr Gaul said.

"The next phase was to further simplify the portal's deeper server 
management features with a new interface layer to sit on top VMware's 
virtual server provisioning system," Mr Gaul said.

That is expected to be available early next year.

The management portal offers 16 base operating system templates, 
including various flavours of Microsoft and Linux servers.

Businesses can configure private or public facing virtual servers and pay 
for them as part of a package starting at $200 a month, which includes 
two CPUs, 4GB of RAM, 100GB of storage and 40GB of internet access 
traffic.

The packages include the licence cost of most operating systems, with the 
exception of Microsoft Windows Small Business Server.

Systems can also be configured for time-based payment on a pay-as-you-go 
basis, with prices dependent on the processing power, RAM and storage. 

For example, the base price for a four CPU system with 32GB RAM would be 
$2.24 an hour with additional hourly charges for storage (0.03c a GB an 
hour) and internet access ($1 a GB).

The PAYG model offers some flavours of the Linux operating system for 
free, including Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, Fedora, Debian and CentOS. Telstra 
charges an extra 9c an hour for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 8c an hour 
for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Windows Server 2003 and 2008 attract a charge of 2c an hour. Windows 
Small Business Server attracts a monthly charge of $8 a user.
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