Why Telstra is stitching together Australia's biggest cloud network

Telstra has opened up to CRN on its cloud infrastructure strategy, a complex web spanning multiple data centres and deals with several third-party public cloud providers.

The telco's vision is to have a cloud solution for every customer requirement - and it wants the ICT channel to take these myriad products to market.

In February, it invited about 60 partners to join its own internal technical training, where the agenda spanned Telstra's own infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, VMware vCloud Air, Cisco Cloud Services and its latest public cloud partnership with IBM SoftLayer.

[The moving pieces behind Telstra's massive IaaS strategy]

Brendan Donohoe, executive director of Telstra Business Solution Sales, told CRN how these three public IaaS platforms each suit different customer requirements: vCloud Air for virtualised VMware environments; Cisco for "web-scale" applications; and SoftLayer for "bare metal" applications, such as legacy apps that can't be virtualised.

Telstra also runs its own CSX cloud platform, powered by its investment in hardware from EMC and Cisco, software licences from VMware and BMC and an application migration and integration partnership with Accenture.

CSX customers can use a credit card to spin up multi-tenant and dedicated virtual machines hosted in Telstra data centres in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney and points of presence in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

In terms of the two biggest public cloud players, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Telstra also provides direct connections into their points of presence; Telstra was announced as a launch partner when Microsoft went live with its Azure public cloud from two Australian data centres late last year.

Telstra has also sewn up a partnership with ASX-listed co-location company NextDC. For customers that are not ready to migrate to a public cloud, but don't want to run infrastructure on their own premises, Telstra helps them migrate into NextDC co-lo facilities.

"Some customers are still adamant, 'My data centre is so critical to me I want to run my own application server and data centre myself'. Some of those customers come to us for disaster recovery," said Donohoe.

"Some are sick of running their own data centre - it is costing them fortune, it is too risky - so they ask if we will run their data centre. They might want to run their own server and their own applications; that solution is NextDC.

"Or they decide they don't want to run their own servers, so they come and say they want a cloud or an IaaS conversation," he added.

Telstra has struck a deal with VCE so that these managed private cloud customers are hosted on high-end Vblock converged infrastructure within NextDC; Telstra will also resell Vblocks to customers that want to keep their applications on-premise.

Next: opportunities for Telstra partners