With Asian web users representing an even larger portion of today’s Internet, Voxel is seeing more of its customers target the Asian market and require Asian web hosting for their applications, social networking tools, ad delivery solutions or media content. Users are demanding top performance and service providers and startups need to deliver that in a cost-effective manner. So how does Voxel address the vast market challenges and differences of Asian hosting? The answer is simpler than one might think.
When we decided to tackle this problem, Voxel first took a look at the differences in hosting between more mature markets (US/Europe) and the Asian web hosting market. We found that:
Network quality varied dramatically from country-to-country or within certain regions, often making a SaaS application hosted in Hong Kong unusable to business customers in Singapore.
Pricing was hidden behind walled gardens of custom quote forms or long term commitments. This was in contrast to the wide array of transparent pricing options available in the US and Europe.
Asian cloud computing offerings were limited and no major public cloud vendors were offering solutions in Asia.
Bandwidth pricing and server bandwidth was much more expensive for end users, or was limited in small quantities like 1Mbps “capped” services.
Voxel recognized that startups in Asia, as well as US and European Internet companies moving into the Asian market, needed these issues addressed in order to fully capitalize on the opportunities in this emerging Internet market. To that end, Voxel decided to open an Asian datacenter and hosting location and extend the Voxel IP network to Singapore and Hong Kong.
We opened our first datacenter presence in Singapore in 2009, enabling our clients to quickly deliver media files, HTTP assets and videos via our Asian CDN nodes. We then worked to build out our network, establish peering relationship and expand regional interconnection options so that we could lower the price of bandwidth for Asian customers and increase the quality and control of the delivery. Finally, late last year, Voxel started offering our popular hosting services in Singapore, including dedicated servers and our cutting-edge VoxCLOUD cloud computing and cloud server product.
BaseManaged raw infrastructure or fully ProManaged services, including custom load-balanced clusters, multi-site hosting options and high-scalability deployments.
Global hosting options via one invoice: the U.S. from our New York hosting facility, Europe from our Amsterdam hosting facility and Asia from our Singapore hosting facility.
24 x 7 x 365 export support on the entire infrastructure stack (hardware, Linux OS, CDN delivery, and application services support).
Local sales offices in both New York and Singapore
We encourage customers who need to target the Asian Internet market to contact us. We have sales engineers available 24 hours per day out of both our New York and Singapore offices and we’d love to help you reach your Asian customer base.
I love to travel and I’m rather opinionated about which cities I like to spend time in. Needless to say, like many people who live here, I think Voxel’s homebase of New York is the greatest city in the world.
About 3 months ago, Sam (our VP of Sales) and I flew down to Austin to visit our friends at Dell in Round Rock, Texas. It was great to meet a lot of the people we’d been dealing with over the years, and we got quite the welcome at 1 Dell Way. During our visit, I remember being surprised at how cool a city Austin is, and I told a few people that I’d love to spend more time there.
Well we’re excited to again be doing just that: Matt, Sam and myself are headed down this week to South by Southwest (SXSW). There are lots of people doing amazing things on the Internet, who are converging in the city known as “a spot of blue in a sea of red”. As a company on the cutting edge of Internet Infrastructure, we figured it’d be interesting to stop by.
Every year it seems like a larger percentage of our client base is in attendance, and this year we’re looking forward to meeting up with them (shout outs to Urban Dictionary, Daily Kos, Pressflex, imgur, UKDM, and dozens more that I’m forgetting).
So if you’re an existing customer who’s going to be in Austin, or if you’d simply like to meet us, give us a shout (and follow us!) twitter.com/voxeldotnet. We’d love to meet up, and drinks are on us this weekend.
On Monday evening our operations staff deployed version 1.09 of the software Voxel has written to control our cloud environment. While a number of bugs and internal-only changes were made in this release which I’ve listed, I’d like to speak specifically about one of the more exciting features added in this release: RedHat Kickstart support.
RedHat based distributions (CentOS, RHEL, Fedora) all support a method of automated installation known as Kickstart. The Kickstart system allows you to define exactly how a system should be installed, including partitioning, software RAID setup, package selection, and more to allow for fully automated end to end provisioning.
Here at Voxel we’ve used custom kickstart files for provisioning of internal systems and client systems for some time. By adding support for custom user supplied kickstart files to our VoxCLOUD and VoxSERVER platforms we hope to allow for a seamless migration path for clients with existing RedHat based deployments, regardless if they are existing systems at Voxel, internal to the customer, or otherwise. Allowing these customers to leverage their existing time investment as well as the wealth of available kickstart examples available on the web.
This combined with some post-installation configuration management functionality we have in the pipeline should provide our customers with a best of breed systems management platform end to end. Stay tuned for future blog posts introducing these new features.
Changes:
Support for user supplied custom kickstart files
A number of bug fixes related to internal packaging and deployment of upgrades
Fixes to prevent some ‘false negatives’ during provisioning. (Situations where installation was successful but was reported as FAILED)
Updated extended status messages during provisioning to contain the action being taken (Install, Clone, Destroy)
Our development and engineering teams have been working since January on some updates to our various infrastructure services, including VoxCAST and our hosting API (hAPI). We are excited to announce that the following features have been deployed to our production systems:
DNS management as part of hAPI – Managing records (including creating, updating and deleting) is now fully support as part of Voxel’s hosted DNS services
We’ve released updated versions of our hAPI clients – These include various bug fixes, code optimizations and validation improvements. Grab them here.
Power management for VoxCLOUD – hAPI now includes data on power utilization for VoxCLOUD devices
In the coming week, you’ll also be seeing some improvements in our logging performance and stability, CDN routing and customer portal. Stay tuned!
The full change log for this release is as follows:
An issue was fixed in VoxCAST OnDemand Customer Portal config section that was causing error messages to not always properly display, leading to failed actions without any indication why.
VoxCAST OnDemand Customer Portal was changed to do more input validation on the origin name fields.
In hAPI, the Content-Type for JSON responses was changed to ‘application/json’ to better avoid XSS attacks in clients.
An issue was fixed in the hAPI perl client library to properly accommodate passwords with ‘@’ or ‘:’ characters.
An issue was fixed in the hAPI method, voxcloud.create, that was failing to properly use the passed-in parameter ‘console_password’.
A new method was added to hAPI, dns.records.create, for creating voxel-managed DNS records for authorized hostnames.
A new method was added to hAPI, dns.records.update, for updating voxel-managed DNS records for authorized hostnames.
A new method was added to hAPI, dns.records.delete, for deleting voxel-managed DNS records for authorized hostnames.
In hAPI, the unused parameter ‘processing_cores’ was removed from the documentation for the method voxcloud.clone.
The hAPI client libraries were updated to use the newer ‘json_v2′ format when returning JSON responses rather than the deprecated ‘json’ hAPI format.
hAPI input validation was changed to display different error messages for when a ‘method’ parameter was missing or invalid.
In hAPI, the methods voxservers.create and voxcloud.create were changed to always auto-assign a backend_ip if one is not provided.
Output for the hAPI method devices.list was extended to report estimated power usage in watts for VoxCLOUD devices.
A misspelling typo was fixed in the documentation for the hAPI method devices.monitors.create.
CloudHarmony.com has released the results of their latest cloud performance tests. In a blog post last week, Voxel’s VoxCLOUD compute platform ranked as the fastest for U.S.-based cloud providers. Check out the full article to see how Voxel ranks: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/02/cloud-speed-test-results.html
Here at Voxel, we continue to push forward our vision of Cloud Computing (API-based, incrementally billed infrastructure) with our VoxCLOUD and VoxSERVER product lines. Recently, we’ve spent some time outlining where we think the industry is going in 2010 and how IaaS providers like Voxel fit in. Two recent press mentions include:
As always, if you’re a client of Voxel’s using our cloud products or have questions, feedback or comments, please feel free to reach out to us with your thoughts and opinions.
This video demonstrates how easy it is to set up both a physical and virtual server with just a couple clicks. Plus, see a basic overview of how to use Voxel’s content delivery network interface, VoxCAST.
Some high level goals we set for this app:
Ease of Use
Display an overview your Voxel global infrastructure at a glance
Give real-time feedback of your infrastructure’s status
Run fast while engaging user with a slick interactive UI
For this first iteration we focused our development around infrastructure. Eventually, we’re going to add full control of client management, including billing, support and more. We’re letting clients test drive our new portal while it’s in development.
It’s been a while since we last talked about Voxel Labs’s mod_cdn Apache module for easily interfacing an existing site with VoxCAST, so it’s definitely time for an update.
We’ve just released mod_cdn 1.1.0, which includes the following new features: * Support for timestamp-based VoxCAST OnDemand token authentication * Support for SSL-based sites * Support for using the X-Forwarded-For header when computing authentication tokens
For current users of mod_cdn, you’ll definitely want to update your server to use this new version in order to take advantage of the new features. Note that existing installations of mod_cdn will require a slight change to the CDNHTMLToServer option in the module’s configuration, so check the included example.conf for more details.
We’re still looking into adding new features such as “intelligent switching” to allow users to have their site automagically use VoxCAST to prevent their server from ever being overwhelmed with requests. With such a feature, a site could easily protect itself from things such as the Slashdot and Digg Effects all without your having to do a thing!
If you’re currently using VoxCAST for your CDN needs and haven’t yet tried mod_cdn, it may be well worth your time to take a look. We’re always available day or night at support@voxel.net to help you with any issues you may encounter, and, of course, we love receiving feature requests for ideas you may have for future releases.
Voxel is expanding worldwide! Following the expansion of the lower Manhattan HQ, Voxel dot Net Pte Ltd (Singapore branch) recently moved into bigger offices in preparation for more staff and expanding regional sales capabilities in the coming months. This move allows us to continue the growth of our Singapore-based cloud hosting and dedicated server offerings, as well as our Asia CDN (Content Delivery Network) services.
The Singapore staff settled into their new home in late November — a sprawling 2,376 sq. ft., office space that definitely has more room than our previous 872 sq. ft. office at Clarke Quay. It is really, really big! The office is located within the Central Business District of Singapore, specifically at 138 Cecil Street, Cecil Court #12-02, Singapore 069538 (Check it out on GoThere.sg). It is very close to the famous Raffles area and the festival market, Lau. Pa Sat, where you can find multi-cultural cuisines — and probably a good number of the Voxel SG staff during lunch time.
If you happen to be in the Asia-Pacific region anytime soon, make sure to drop by our office and be delighted with the Voxel Spirit in our new and colorful home. We’d be more than happy to give you a tour of our office, as well as our Singapore Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Server facility nearby! See you around!
Since Voxel hosts some of the web’s most widely read, most highly trafficked websites, we run across (and thrive on) complex, multi-server, multi-stage deployments. This means that we’re continually trying to find the best way to automate releases into these environments. Recently, we were tasked with figuring out the best way to push code updates onto a large web cluster running a popular Ruby on Rails application. Here’s what we did:
With Asian web users representing an even larger portion of today’s Internet, Voxel is seeing more of its customers target the Asian market and require Asian web hosting for their applications, social networking tools, ad delivery solutions or media content. Users are demanding top performance and service providers and startups need to deliver that in a cost-effective manner. So how does Voxel address the vast market challenges and differences of Asian hosting? The answer is simpler than one might think.
Voxel recognized that startups in Asia, as well as US and European Internet companies moving into the Asian market, needed these issues addressed in order to fully capitalize on the opportunities in this emerging Internet market. To that end, Voxel decided to open an Asian datacenter and hosting location and extend the Voxel IP network to Singapore and Hong Kong.
