Korea's First Large Scale Private Cloud

KT, a global landline operator based in Korea, announced the launch of Korea’s first large scale private cloud, along with its partner Cloudscaling. This private cloud is to be a firm platform for KT’s internal business operations, and its architectural design is similar to Amazon, Yahoo, GoGrid, Engine Yard, Google (News - Alert), Puppet Labs, and Rackspace.

The software stack is based primarily on highly available free or open source software; it is scalable and ready to be deployed. This move was in response to the increasing data emergence from the use of smartphones, multimedia, and the Internet. KT (News - Alert) intends to use cloud computing as its platform to provide a wide range of data-centric services to smartphones and tablet PCs, delivering scalable and cost-effective computing infrastructure to its own business.

To complete this transition from a traditional system to private cloud computing, KT met with a number of vendors providing services based on Internet. KT also carried out its own private research to find the right match for their business, and finally selected Cloudscaling as its partner. KT was founded in the year 1981, and has today grown to be the largest fixed-line operator in Korea, and the second largest mobile carrier. By the year 1997 KT had achieved 20 million telephone subscribers, and by the year 2008 it had reached a milestone of having more than 10 million high-speed internet subscribers. The first WiBro service was also launched during this period.

In a press release, the Senior VP of Cloud Services Business Unit at KT, Jung-sik Suh, said, "As a 117 year old company, we have a great deal of tradition. For this project, we rethought our traditional decision process by setting up a new cloud division so we could move quickly. We broke almost all of the unwritten rules to accomplish this. The leaders in cloud technology are Internet companies, not telcos or enterprise IT companies. We wanted a cloud computing partner that understood our vision for cloud services, which is a cost-competitive offering at a high quality of service. Cloudscaling delivered what we were looking for."

CEO and founder of Cloudscaling, Randy Bias, added, "KT's approach to cloud computing is bold. Modeling their cloud computing architecture after the most efficient and lowest-cost public cloud providers should allow them to leapfrog regional competitors who are building clouds based on enterprise architectures."