The time has come: Telekom's public cloud offering is getting a new release. The focus is on a new cloud turbo booster: In July, the closed beta phase of FPGA hardware acceleration started in the Open Telecom Cloud. FPGA is the abbreviation for Field Programmable Gate Array. This makes servers considerably faster, up to 100 times, depending on the application. The reason lies in its architecture, which is defined by software rather than hardware. This makes FPGAs highly flexible. In addition, in contrast to a graphics processing unit (GPU), for example, the packing density of the processor cores on one volume unit is significantly higher (3,000 for GPU versus 2 million for FPGA). "With FPGA boards, I can prescribe how they work, the order in which processes are to be processed and how fast they work. This makes their deployment scenarios almost limitless," says Max Guhl, product manager at Open Telekom Cloud.
Faster computing, faster (up)loading: July release of the Open Telekom Cloud
Interested developers can now register for the closed beta phase by sending an e-mail to opentelekomcloud@telekom.de. During the beta phase they will have the opportunity to test the FPGA boards for free: until November, developers only pay for the servers they use, not for the acceleration. At the end of the closed beta phase, the FPGA flavors will then be available to all interested users.
In addition, the new release of the Open Telekom Cloud now offers a solution for all those who want to transfer enormous amounts of data into the cloud quickly: the new Mobile Storage Solution. The principle: Deutsche Telekom provides companies with storage media by courier. Data can be stored here securely and encrypted. The storage media is then brought by courier either to the highly secure data center in Biere near Magdeburg or to the nearest network node. Experts from Deutsche Telekom then quickly move all the data into the Open Telekom Cloud.
In this way, even petabytes can be uploaded to the cloud within a very short space of time. "Uploading such quantities over a normal data connection would take weeks or even months, depending on the bandwidth," says Guhl. "With the Mobile Storage Solution this can be done within a few days. In our public cloud, companies can then for example use FPGA to analyze the data within a very short period of time."
What’s more, the new release of the Open Telekom Cloud offers over 90 detail improvements and optimizations that provide additional ease of use and performance. These include:
- Bring your own key: The Open Telekom Cloud's key management service allows you to use your own security keys in Telekom's public cloud
- Additional encryption function: A new encryption function has been added to the Relational Database Service (RDS). In addition, the Open Telekom Cloud for the RDS now offers high availability for Microsoft SQL servers.
- New dedicated host flavors: In addition to the existing dedicated host flavors with XEN hypervisor, there are now three new dedicated host flavors with kernel-based virtual machine hypervisor (KVM).
- Disk-intensive flavors: The Open Telekom Cloud now offers a wider selection of memory-intensive flavors with more memory and higher performance. The largest disk-intensive flavor now offers 540 GB RAM main memory and 43.2 TB data storage.
- Tag management services: This allows users to evaluate almost all the services more transparently using tags.
- Performance and service improvements: In addition, more than 90 detail improvements increase the ease of use and performance of the public cloud offering.