The Open Telekom Cloud is expanded and improved at regular intervals. And the time has come again: March brings a new release of Telekom’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. Users will benefit from two new functions in the area of platform services, as well as numerous extensions of existing features for greater functionality and ease of use.

The first new function: Data Ingestion Service (DIS) The service automatically streams data to the Open Telekom Cloud, thereby ensuring the quick availability of large data volumes in the cloud. DIS saves continuously to the Open Telekom Cloud either in real time or batchwise, depending on user preference. Moreover, the new DIS serves users by facilitating the prioritisation of sources, validation of individual files and transfer of data to the right destination.

The second new feature: the Document Database Service (DDS) which is based on the community edition protocol of the MongoDB NoSQL database. Thanks to a clearly structured control panel, users can monitor and scale database entities with just a few clicks. Furthermore, the service now makes it possible to manage differently structured information conveniently in a single database.  

The new release of the Open Telekom Cloud also offers numerous expansions. These include new ‘flavors’ – virtual machines (VMs) that are preconfigured according to the use case. In the Elastic Cloud Server category, among the basic flavors, for example, users can now select a new version with 60 vCPUs and up to 512 GB RAM. In addition, the advanced flavors include new GPU flavors. These are especially well-suited for use with artificial intelligence, cryptography and machine learning.

Here, users have the choice between virtual machines with either an Nvidia M60 graphics card for graphics-intensive applications or the new Nvidia P100 graphics card for computation-intensive applications. They can select flavors with 16 vCPUs, 64 GB RAM and a graphic processing unit (GPU), or flavors with up to 32 vCPUs, 256 GB RAM and four Nvidia P100 GPUs.

In the Bare Metal Server area as well, the new release of the Open Telekom Cloud brings greater flexibility. The GPU-accelerated version is now available with 2 × 14 Intel Xeon processor cores, 512 GB RAM and eight Nvidia P100 graphics cards. Alternatively, the high-performance version offers 2 × 16 Skylake Xeon Gold processor cores and 192 GB RAM. Both options provide a 100 Gbit/s InfiniBand network connection.

• Image Management Service: This existing Open Telekom Cloud service also supports the VHDX image format from Windows systems.
   
• Tag Management Service: In companies, different departments make use of different IT resources. The Open Telekom Cloud’s Tag Management Service helps in assigning these to the right cost centre. With the new release, users can now designate even greater capacity by means of tags. This facilitates the administrative overview as well as associated accounting processes.
   
• NAT gateway as a component of a Virtual Private Cloud: Combine multiple servers under a single IP address. With the NAT gateway users no longer must operate a server of their own in the function of a gateway.
   
• Private Line Access Service (PLAS): The Open Telekom Cloud now offers greater convenience in provisioning, as Direct Connect connections via Ethernet can be ordered more easily and are also made available more quickly.
   
• Extensions to the Workspace Service: Thanks to two-factor authentication, virtual desktops from the Open Telekom Cloud are now even more secure. In addition, they now also provide access to the Internet.
   
• Storage Lifecycle Management: Not all storage is alike – in the cloud there are different formats for every purpose. So that they can benefit at any time from the most cost-effective storage method for a particular case, companies can easily set rules in the Open Telekom Cloud to specify at what point certain data is transferred into more favourable Object Storage classes.
   
• Content Delivery Network: The Akamai content delivery network offers the acceleration of Web services independent of the user’s location. Companies can now book this very easily with the Open Telekom Cloud.