TORONTO – Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been setting up data centres around the world offering a wide range of compute and analytics services in competition and partnership with local service providers and on Thursday it announced it has come to Canada, opening two data centres here – as promised earlier in the year .
Now it’s looking to partner with telecommunications firms to resell its services.
“If you look around the world there are many telco partners who work with us closely to take our services to market and offer complimentary services to the AWS platform,” AWS Canada director Eric Gales (pictured) said in an interview, “so you can certainly anticipate that we are talking to those kinds of companies in Canada as well to explore those opportunities.”
He didn’t say who his targets are, but the logical ones are Bell Canada, Telus, Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications, each of whom also have their own data centre businesses.
There are a wide range of ways Amazon partners with service providers. For example, in the U.S. Verizon Enterprise Solutions can link customers using its secure cloud interconnect service for its private IP Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) or Ethernet networks to AWS and Microsoft’s similar Azure cloud services.
Another way Amazon is getting into telco data centre services is through wireless equipment maker Ericsson, which is establishing AWS-based cloud innovation centres with service providers. Australian carrier Telstra said in February it will be one customer.
It’s not unexpected in the hot data centre market, says Mark Schrutt, who manages the IT services and enterprise applications analysis team at market research firm IDC Canada. Bell, Telus and Rogers have been scaling back some of their cloud services, particularly infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)– where customers can rent compute and storage capabilities as they need — and going for partnerships. “They’ve been partnering big time with Microsoft [Azure], that’s the preferred partner at this point just because of the large partner network they [Microsoft] already have, and IBM. In a way having in-Canada delivery actually helps them out because they can resell Azure and AWS from Canada.”
Exactly 12 months ago, Telus announced a managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering using Azure’s Canadian data centres. In May, Bell Business Markets began offering high-speed access to Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Cogeco’s Peer 1 data centre division announced in October that it was following suit. Rogers announced in July a new IaaS services in partnership with OVH, a French-based data centre operator with facilities in Canada.
“Eventually they will all be resellers of AWS, Microsoft and most likely Google when that picks up and comes to Canada,” Schrutt predicts.
AWS is no stranger here, despite having no data centres in the country until now. It has sales and support offices to back a large number of Canadian customers, including National Bank, BlackBerry, Postmedia and Porter Airlines. However, a lot of public and private sector organizations are reluctant to put sensitive data cloud data centres outside Canada, in part for regulatory reasons. In fact, AWS freely admits going after those organizations is one of the reasons it has now moved north.
At a corporate customer event in Toronto where the announcement was made, Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, said the main reason for a local data centre is to improve performance of customers’ workloads. But, he added, “some of you are subject to regulatory requirements that have some data residency requirements, or maybe some customers feel more comfortable having something inside their territory.”
Global service providers such as Salesforce, a customer relationship management suite, and Box, a cloud storage provider, will also use AWS Canada facilities as well, he added.
What Amazon calls the AWS Canada (Central) Region offers two availability zones, or data centres, which are far enough apart to significantly reduce the risk of a single event shutting them both at the same time. While Amazon has a number of availability zones around the world, customer data can’t be moved out of a zone without customer permission.
A small example of the power Amazon brings is the move Toronto-based Porter Airlines, a regional carrier that serves Toronto, Ottawa, New Jersey and other cities, made to AWS. Data residency wasn’t an issue, Dan Donovan, the company’s vice-president of information systems, said in an interview, in part because its reservation system was already based in the U.S. However, other parts of its infrastructure, hosted by an unnamed telecommunication provider, weren’t up to the job, with the airlines’ web site sometimes crashing after it announced a promotion. Porter needed more flexibility.
“We liked the agility and the scale that was offered by Amazon and public cloud provides,” he said.
Photo by Howard Solomon
