For years Japan’s Dimension Data has been active in this country providing consulting services and reselling hardware and software from a number of vendors.
Now it is a direct service provider.
The company, a division of NTT Group, has added Canada to the countries where its Managed Cloud Platform can be bought by enterprises.
That brings the number of countries its public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and managed hosting service is available to 13, including the U.S.,New Zealand, and, next month, Brazil.
Separately Dimension Data said Cisco Systems Inc. will use the Managed Cloud Platform and software as a service solutions to deliver a suite of mid-market cloud services that includes Microsoft’s SQL Server and SharePoint to organizations and resellers.
“Brazil, Canada, and New Zealand are significant new expansions to our MCP capacity and demonstrate acceleration in the pace of additional deployments,” Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s ITaaS business unit said in a statement. “Adding seven new MCPs in just 12 months has almost doubled our footprint. Expanding to 13 MCP locations gives Dimension Data the largest enterprise-class cloud presence in the world, and is testament to increasing global demand from both new and existing clients.”
Dimension Data is actively expanding in the cloud space, having recently bought Teleris, a cloud-based visual communications service provider. It has also gained certification as a cloud and hosted provider for SAP applications and a Microsoft Azure private cloud service provider.
The company says its cloud services are enterprise-ready, offering 99.99 per cent availability on its public cloud services, plus multiple layers of security and administrative controls. Virtual Windows or Linux servers with up to 16 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM can be provisioned in less than five minutes, it says, with up to 10 TB of block based storage per server. It offers hourly and monthly pricing plans.
Similarly the private cloud includes servers, tiered storage and networking, but in a customer’s data centre.
The deal with Cisco allows Dimension Data solutions to be bought over that company’s Intercloud network announced in March. Cisco Intercloud will host applications through a number of international carriers and service providers including the Allstream division of Manitoba Telecom Service and Toronto’s OnX Managed Services.
Dimension Data will evolve its cloud platform to connect with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Intercloud Fabric architecture.
Cisco said it will initially package its Intercloud Fabric, UCS Director and Dimension Data’s public IaaS into two different hybrid cloud solutions, giving customers different ways to go on hybrid cloud, depending on the state of their IT environment. The two hybrid cloud solutions are expected to be available globally from Cisco within 90 days, with additional solutions available in the coming months.
Later this year, Dimension Data will offer Cisco partners the opportunity to sell some cloud services directly to their Canadian customers, said Roy Purtill, vice president of cloud computing for Cisco Canada. “Canadian customers will reap the benefits of a hybrid cloud model, while partners will be able to maintain existing relationships with both Cisco and Cisco partners, and provide cloud services without incurring significant costs for new infrastructure. The service is expected to be available in Canada by the summer.”
