07-09-2018

• July release with start of beta test for FPGA hardware acceleration
• New service enables transfer of huge amounts of data into the cloud
• More than 90 improvements for more ease of use and performance

With the latest release, the Open Telekom Cloud now comes with a computing turbo. From July, Deutsche Telekom's public cloud offering based on OpenStack also offers new functions, services and flavors as well as numerous improvements for greater ease of use and performance.

Ten times faster image recognition

With the new release of the Open Telekom Cloud the closed beta phase of the new FPGA flavors starts. FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Arrays and means, in simple terms, hardware acceleration. This makes Deutsche Telekom's public cloud even better suited for complex processes that require particularly high performance. For example, the FPGAs accelerate the machine learning image recognition by more than ten times. Data analysis increases speed by a factor of 50 compared to normal CPUs. Cloud FPGA increases genome sequencing by a factor of 100. By comparison, a genome analysis that would otherwise take more than 30 hours could be completed in less than 20 minutes using FPGA.

Interested developers can apply for the test phase under this e-mail address. The closed beta phase ends in November, when the new FPGA flavor will be available to all users.

Mobile Storage Solution: Transfer huge amounts of data into the cloud

With the Mobile Storage Solution, companies can transfer enormous amounts of data into the Open Telecom Cloud in the shortest possible time. The information is first copied to secure Deutsche Telekom storage media, encrypted there and then sent by courier directly to the data center in Biere near Magdeburg or imported at suitable network nodes. In this way, even petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = 1.5 million CD-ROM) can be transferred to the cloud within a few days. Uploading such quantities over a normal data connection would take weeks or even months, depending on the bandwidth. The offer is aimed, for example, at users who have to transfer very large amounts of data into the cloud very quickly due to short-term projects.

"The steady expansion of our services not only ensures continuously increasing performance and improved ease of use for companies," says Stefan Bucher, Executive Program Manager Open Telekom Cloud. "Our sustained engagement also underscores our commitment to the open cloud architecture OpenStack, on which the Open Telekom Cloud is based.”

Further optimizations of the Open Telekom Cloud in the July release

• Bring your own key: Open Telekom Cloud's Key Management Service allows users to apply their own security keys in Telekom's public cloud.
• Additional encryption: A new encryption function is added to the Relational Database Service (RDS). In addition, the Open Telekom Cloud now offers RDS with high availability for Microsoft SQL servers.
• New Dedicated Host flavors: In addition to the existing Dedicated Host flavors with XEN hypervisor, there are now three new Dedicated Host flavors with Kernel-Based Virtual Machine Hypervisor (KVM).
• Disk-intensive flavors: Open Telekom Cloud now offers a wider selection of memory-intensive flavors with more memory and more performance. The largest disk-intensive flavor now offers 540 GB RAM main memory and 43.2 TB data storage.
• Tag Management Services: This means that users can now analyze almost all services more transparently using tags.
• Performance and service improvements: In addition, more than 90 detail improvements increase the ease of use and performance of the public cloud offering.