The November 2017 release will undoubtedly focus attention on our storage services, as they see the addition of entirely new options and extensions. Following the inclusion of cold and warm storage to the object storage option, other storage features will now take center stage.

Elastic Volume Storage (EVS) was previously available in three performance classes: SATA, SAS, and SSD. Customers who have higher performance requirements can now book a boost mode for both SAS and SSD. The boosts achieve data throughput speeds of up to 1 Gbps, 30,000 IOPS and average response times of 1 ms (SSD boosted). These offerings are intended for users who have extreme requirements for data transfer speeds.

The boosts are flanked by a prepaid EVS model for buying storage at lower prices. The budget will then be paid off over three months. The Volume Backup Service has also been given a more powerful big brother: whereas backups were previously limited to individual volumes, the new Cloud Server Backup Service (CSBS) makes it possible to back up and restore entire IT systems (consisting of multiple components) with a single click.

However, the real star is a new addition: with its Scalable File Service the Open Telekom Cloud is implementing Manila, another OpenStack-native service. Manila is a network storage solution that is as flexible as object storage. It scales automatically with the stored data quantity, not only with regard to storage volumes (up to 10 PB), but also bandwidth (up to 2.5 Gbps). It also delivers much higher performance than object storage. Its greater intelligence enables access from different servers, making it similar to network-attached storage (NAS).

Even if there are no new flavors, the computing segment has a significant new innovation in store: the new release sees KVM take its place on the screen. The basic flavors (General Purpose, Computing I/II and Large Memory) can, in the future, be produced either on Xen or KVM as the hypervisor. KVM substantially enhances the performance of most applications.

The advanced flavors will continue to be produced on Xen. At the same time, the Open Telekom Cloud team will introduce TPM chips, providing the platform with an optional security boost. TPM chips provide an additional layer of security on the hardware level. They always "know" where they have to be, and they only work when they actually spring into action.

Demanding apps can look forward to the new Bare Metal offerings: three new main memory (RAM) sizes, 256 GB, 2 TB, and 4 TB, plus 100 GBit/s between the Bare-Metal-Servers. Virtual Private Cloud IPv6-ready: the upgrades for the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) move even closer towards the "basics". While it now also supports addressing for IPv6 addresses, which means that applications previously using these address spaces can now be operated on the Open Telekom cloud, November will, on the other hand, see the arrival of SNAT. Source Network Address Translation permits the optimum usage of the available Elastic IP Adresses. SNAT allocates multiple "internal", private IP addresses within the Open Telekom Cloud to a collective public IP address.

Other management and security services make working with the Open Telekom Cloud even more straightforward. For example, the Grant Master Key gives external workers easy, temporary access to encrypted data. Multi-Project for Identity and Access Management (IAM) makes it possible to group a number of different users or projects as part of a single tenant. This has the advantage of technically separating the resources used while also allocating them to one contract so that the individual projects form a single whole that can, for example, benefit from better bulk prices with regard to object storage.

In addition to a other, smaller additions, a Data Warehouse Service (DWS) rounds out the spectrum of new services: data warehouses consolidate data from a variety of sources, enabling data analytics beyond these individual silos. The Data Warehouse Service in the Open Telekom Cloud copies the original data to a database and then consolidates it in a data model. Once again, the Open Telekom Cloud provides you with an array of great new options.