Published on the 07/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
A service billed as the first regional network-as-a-service (NaaS) system offering elastic bandwidth for enterprise CIOs has been announced by Pacnet and is scheduled to go live early next year…
For many organisations managing and paying for network bandwidth – particularly for international connections – remains a costly headache. Some organisations may only require fat pipes occasionally – to upload video or send 3D printing files – but in the past they have had to build excess capacity into their networks to deal with these occasional but important demands.
Nigel Stitt, Pacnet’s ANZ managing director, said that; “Previously companies had to buy fixed line capacity. Now they can self-provision in three to seven minutes for an hour, a week, a day or a month.
“Say a manufacturer here wanted to do 3D printing in China. They could do the design here and print in China. They don’t need a 1 Gbyte pipe,” instead they need 1Gbyte capacity to be available on demand he said, for an hour at a time.
The company also believes its new service could radically reform companies’ approach to business continuity and disaster recovery as it would allow a company to provision bandwidth sufficient to allow a complete mirror of its data centre to be sent to a remote site each night.
The new service which is dubbed PEN (Pacnet Enabled Network) announced earlier this week is currently in beta release with a few regional customers. Just as infrastructure-as-a-service allows enterprises to scale up access to computer power on demand, Pacnet’s network-as-a-service will allow them to boost the bandwidth available for as little or as long as needed.
According to Jim Fagan, the Hong Kong president of managed services for Pacnet who was in Australia last week for meetings with communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, the new service will “feel like infinite capacity” to an end user.
However it’s not a service that CIOs can dial up using the corporate credit card – to access the NaaS they will have to already have access to Pacnet’s communications networks. Once armed with that they can set up their own flow parameters according to Fagan, allowing them to control the duration of a service, the bandwidth and the latency.
Pacnet’s Sydney-based data centre is playing a key role in a Pan-Asian cloud networking service now in beta release ahead of a launch slated for February 2014.
