Managed service provider Virtela has revamped its infrastructure with a virtualized platform off of which it will run a range of services, the first of which is flat-fee WAN optimization service with a money back guarantee if customers are unhappy with performance.
The Cloud-Based Application Acceleration Service optimizes traffic as it crosses Virtela’s network among 50 points of presence, reducing network transit times and speeding up application performance.
Tech Debate: Cloud: Public or private?
The service costs $US5 per day per site for sites with up to 45Mbps WAN links, and prices go up from there. Virtela guarantees speeds will be five to 25 times faster, and if the service doesn’t measure up to the SLA speed – or if the customer just isn’t satisfied – the provider will refund 250% of the service charge, says Virtela CEO Vab Goel.
Most sites will be close enough to a POP – Virtela calls them local cloud centers – so delay in the local loop will be negligible, he says, but if customers want to optimize the local loop as well, Virtela will include a virtual accelerator in customer sites.
Virtela says it has partnerships with more than 500 carriers worldwide to tie in local customer sites in 190 countries.
The provider uses commercial WAN optimization software to accelerate customer traffic, but won’t say which ones. It also uses commercial virtual environments to support its service cloud, and it won’t say which vendors it uses for virtualization either.
But Goel does say that the company will use its Enterprise Services Cloud infrastructure to support other services in the near future.
Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.