VIRTUAL MACHINES

AT&T upped its cloud portfolio Monday when announced it was working with VMware and Sun to develop its own cloud computing service.’

Much like other cloud computing offerings, AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service aims to give users scalable on-demand computing capacity that they can increase or decrease depending on their immediate needs and without the need to invest heavily in on-site infrastructure. The service’s key features include a Web portal for ordering and managing service capacity; disk capacity for every virtual server’s operating system; and 24-hour network monitoring and management by AT&T’s support staff.

The service utilizes VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform and its vCloud API to help AT&T connect and integrate its own cloud with the public Web. AT&T also says that it is also using Sun’s hardware software and reference architecture to “create an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services.” Sun, along with IBM, was one of the first companies to offer a computing-on-demand service that treated computing power more like a utility and that was a precursor to today’s cloud-based offerings.