Almost a year ago, I blogged about virtualizing the voxel datacenter. In the post, I was a bit contemptuous on the hype surrounding “cloud computing”, but nonetheless alluded to how Voxel was going to get on the cloud bandwagon with our own service: “SilverLining”.
Other than the cloudophony getting louder with each passing month, what’s happened since then? Last quarter, Voxel launched the SilverLining Technology Preview (SLTP). We’ve had current clients and other interested alpha-testers kick the tires of our cloud service and instantiate thousands of virtualized servers via API’s and our desktop Adobe AIR control panel. Most importantly, we’re continuing to get substantive feedback and real-world suggestions that are helping shape and polish the product prior to its public beta launch.
Voxel is a Managed Hosting company at heart. Yes, we are also a CDN and happen to operate one of the largest global Tier-2 backbones in the world. However, our core value is providing proactive 24×7x365 expert support to help clients deploy, manage and scale their Internet infrastructure. We’ve been doing this for 10 years, so it’s a bit strange to come in on a given morning and find out that a client created and destroyed upwards of a hundred servers the previous night, all by themselves, without bothering to call into our support team, let alone their account manager! A bit strange, but extremely cool.
Seeing the wide range of applications and use cases of our SLTP participants has been enlightening. They run gamut from simple blogs, to dynamically-scalable encoding, to distributed data-mining applications. A lot of it is the same as what people are doing on our traditional (a.k.a. dedicated, real, non-virtualized, non cloudy) servers.
Where it gets different (and really amazing) is when the application knows about the cloud – and can take advantage of the elasticity to scale up and down as needed utilizing our hAPI (Hosting API). “Infrastructure provisioned via an API? Sounds like Amazon EC2!”. That’s a pretty typical response we get from customers. It’s a fair comparison and while there are some similarities, there are also a lot of differences in the Voxel approach to infrastructure that make us unique.
We’ve found that the cloud and virtualization (remember, they’re not the same thing!) are just plain unsuitable for a lot of workloads, industries, and even customer mindsets or business/regulatory requirements. Customers appreciate being able to mix and match their traditional servers and cloud servers and they want a flexible and hybrid approach to their infrastructure. We’ve had a lot of interesting discussions with our clients about private clouds and cloud-like traditional servers.
What’s clear is that very few complex infrastructure deployments are going to switch over completely to the cloud. The escape velocity is just too high, in the short term.
We couldn’t agree more, which is why we’re doubling down on hybrid hosting with VoxSTRUCTURE.
When it comes to talking about bandwidth with customers, our sales girls and guys are fond of talking about Universal Transfer. They often say that “a gigabyte delivered is a gigabyte delivered, would you like to do so via your servers or the CDN?”. What they mean is that it just doesn’t matter whether it is delivered over a dedicated server, or the VoxCAST global content delivery network (CDN), or even over SilverLining. It’s all the same pricing and same commit. Universal Transfer is really just hybrid bandwidth – and it provides enormous flexibility to our customers. We are the only company in the world to offer anything like it.
VoxSTRUCTURE is all about creating ‘best of breed’ infrastructure. So it’s important for us to extend that same flexibility to servers. Soon, our sales people will be saying “a server is a server”. Unlike Amazon, the 800lb gorilla of Cloud Computing, we’re not going to force cloud servers down your throat. Unlike ThePlanet, the 800lb gorilla of Dedicated Hosting, we won’t pigeon-hole you into traditional dedicated servers.
What Voxel will be doing is moving beyond mixing different types of infrastructure by making it truly seamless to combine cloud and dedicated servers. This means being able to put both cloud servers and dedicated servers behind the same firewall or load balancer. It means being able to use the same IP addresses and VLANs across whatever is powering your application or website.
Most importantly, it means abstracting the differences in how the underlying technology works and fronting it all with the same world-class support team, customer portal, and set of APIs.
Virtual. Dedicated. Cloud. Private. Hourly. Monthly. At the end of the day, it’s all just infrastructure (or rather, VoxSTRUCTURE).
Voxel’s job is to help you choose what makes the most sense to you, your business, and your application. Chances are the ideal solution will involve a mix of technologies – some new fangled and some more old fashioned.
Stay tuned for more information about VoxSTRUCTURE and the evolution of SilverLining. We’re hard at work at breaking down the silos to create an extremely cohesive service stack — and we’re excited to invite more of you to take advantage of Voxel’s intelligent infrastructure.
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[...] than the rule for the average enterprise. This belief is the reason why we are so focused on our hybrid hosting approach — allowing companies to mix and match traditional and cloud infrastructure and make [...]