AT&T countered recent claims by Verizon of being part of the largest OpenStack deployments, though welcomed its rival to the ecosystem
AT&T looks to have taken exception to a claim by rival Verizon Communications regarding the size of a recent OpenStack-powered cloud development.
Writing on the company’s Innovation Blog, Sorabh Saxena, SVP of software development and engineering – technology development at AT&T, touted the carrier’s AT&T Integrated Cloud platform, which is where AT&T runs virtual network functions using OpenStack software at its core. Saxena reiterated previous claims by AT&T that it had set up 74 AIC physical locations in 2015, with plans for 105 by the end of this year and adding “hundreds more” by 2020.
“We believe AIC is already the biggest OpenStack deployment in the world,” Saxena said. “And it’s going to get much bigger.”
The statement comes on the heels of Verizon earlier this week touting it recently completed the industry’s largest known network functions virtualization OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its U.S. data centers. Verizon said deployments are currently in progress across additional domestic data centers and aggregation sites; that it plans for international location deployments over the next several months; and expects design adoption in edge network sites by the end of the year.
While not naming names, Saxena hinted at the Verizon announcement, offering open arms to the OpenStack space.
“We’ve noticed this week that some of our competitors are beginning to explore this space,” Saxena wrote. “We welcome them. The more companies that use OpenStack, the more developers will support it and expand its capabilities.”
Saxena also highlighted AT&T winning the OpenStack Superuser award, which is voted on by the developer community.
However, despite the OpenStack accolades and AT&T’s commitment to the platform, Saxena noted it was still not prepared to handle all of the tasks AT&T has planned. That has resulted in the carrier customizing some functions to better conform to its virtualization plans.
“Indeed, while OpenStack is a great resource, it’s not quite ready for everything we need it to do,” Saxena said. “So we’re automating many of the complex design, build, manage and operational functions for a massively distributed yet centralized cloud platform, like AIC. We’re also integrating OpenStack into our larger technology ecosystem. For example, we built what we call the OpenStack Resource Manager, or ORM. This lets us manage AIC as one global cloud platform despite its highly distributed nature. We can quickly push out updates to all the AIC zones using this tool. We can also use ORM to manage the distribution of workloads that run on AIC.”
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