Verizon Business Adds Hosting Support for AIX and HP-UX

Published: September 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Verizon Business, the hosting and utility computing unit of telecom giant Verizon Communications, has announced that it is adding two Unix variants--IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX--to the list of operating system platforms that it will create so customers can run their applications on them in its Verizon Business data centers.

Before Verizon ate MCI, which was formerly MCI Worldcom and which itself had eaten the Digex application hosting business, the telecom company had 47,000 MIPS of aggregate mainframe data processing capacity and over 10,000 Unix and Windows servers with over 1.1 petabytes of storage in its hosting business. The combination with MCI has surely made the size of the Verizon Business operations much larger--but how much larger is a secret.

Up until now, Verizon Business has supported Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix, Microsoft's Windows Server, and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux in its application hosting environments. The addition of AIX and HP-UX to the mix shows two things: that customers are asking Verizon Business to provide AIX and HP-UX application hosting, and that the company has enough confidence in the future viability of these two operating systems to build up systems and build out its business based on that confidence. With these five platforms, Verizon Business can cover the majority of customer needs. The only other one it might think about adding is Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Verizon Business not only offers hosting in its own data centers on the five platforms mentioned above, but also offers hardware break/fix, remote application management, software administration and patching, backup and other data center services for customers who use these platforms.