Are you in Hong Kong or the region and interested in networks, peering, cloud and other such topics?  If so, give us a shout!  Our founder and CEO, Raj Dutt, and VP of Sales, Sam Machiz, will be attending and speaking at the 2010 “Beer & Peer” conference put on by Equinix.  We’ll be in Hong Kong from Monday, August 30th through Wednesday, September 1st.

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Voxel has strong relationship with Equinix and we’re proud to announce the growth of our on-demand services, including VoxCLOUD, VoxCAST and VoxSERVERS, in additional global Equinix facilities.  With the expansion of our content and cloud delivery services world-wide, Equinix has proven themselves a valuable datacenter and interconnection partner.   You can read the full press release and associated case study here.

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Voxel has joined walkaboutnyc.com, a great event that is happening all around NYC this coming Friday, June 11th.  The idea is that you can come and visit all of your favorite NYC-based startups.  Other great companies such as Meetup.com, Etsy, blip.tv and more are already signed up and are opening their lofts, offices and startup stomping grounds to the masses.

We’re lucky enough to have some other startups right in our office space, including online video platform Twistage and the Drupal consultancy Advomatic, so stopping by the Voxel offices should give you a peek into other firms thriving in NYC.

And to set the record straight, our offices (29 Broadway, 30th Floor — just south of Wall Street) don’t have any servers in them! We keep those at 3 separate facilities here in metro New York.  If time and crowds allow, we’ll be happy to give anybody willing to stick around a quick tour of one of them so that you can see the actual guts of our cloud hosting, dedicated server and content delivery (CDN) network at work.

Hope to see you on Friday!

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June is set to be a busy month over here at Voxel — in addition to constant product improvements to our VoxCLOUD, VoxSERVER and VoxCAST product lines, we’ll also be dispatching some of our top brass to various industry events around the world.

First off is the Echelon 2010 conference in Singapore, organized by our fine friends over at e27.  Echelon is the leading web technology conference in Asia and Voxel’s CEO, Raj Dutt, will be joining a panel discussion titled “Changing Enterprise 2.0: Implications of Cloud Computing, Social and Web Services” on Wednesday, June  2nd at 11:30 AM.  The panel will include industry leaders and many of our highly respected competitors in the cloud infrastructure space, including Jim Fagan of Rackspace, Simone Brunozzi of Amazon and Roger Lim of WebVisions.  Details on the panel can be found here.

Then, on Thursday, June 3rd at 11:40, we’ll be participating in the Telx CBX conference here in New York City.  Held at the Time Square Marriott Marquis Hotel, the CBX event is a mix of professional networking and strategic talks about the future of interconnection, networks, and how that relates to the changes going on in computing.   Voxel will be participating in a panel conversation titled “Financial Trading: Virtualization, cloud computing, energy efficient processors… what is the Financial Services Data Center of the future?“  As a provider of dynamic infrastructure the financially-focused markets of New York, Amsterdam and Singapore, we’re excited to be participating in this conversation.  You can find more details and register for the event here.

We look forward to seeing any and all of you in New York or Singapore — and if you’re in town for one of the events, make sure to get in touch and stop by our offices or tour our cloud computing, dedicated managed hosting and VoxCAST CDN nodes.

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One of the questions we asked ourselves when we decided to bring our VoxCLOUD technologies together in a Private Cloud offering, was why would a enterprise or service provider (our target customers for the offering) want to buy a Private Cloud solution from an infrastructure and hosting company vs. a pure software company?   Our “amateur” market research had told us that customers who wanted private cloud were primarily interested in:

• Service delivery model – Customers love the delivery model of cloud computing: robust APIs, near-instant server provisioning and consistent hosting environments across server roles or hardware.
• Cost savings – If the company had either a large investment in existing hardware or had the CAPEX budget to make a large investment in equipment, they wanted to realize cost savings of running their applications on a fixed asset, as opposed to the hourly surcharged equipment cost of a public cloud.
• Compliance – Industry or internal compliance requirements or security policies might make it impossible or very difficult to deploy in a public cloud or 3rd party datacenter.   Deploying cloud technology in one’s own datacenter environment is often a requirement.

What we didn’t find was that customers were begging and pleading to support the entire infrastructure or technology stack with their own operations team (not necessarily a huge surprise – internal IT teams are overworked as it is!).   So for most customers, opting for a Private Cloud installation is being driven more from financial analysis and hardware choice/location than internal support for all aspects of the solution.

So why Voxel?

As a leader in managed services across the infrastructure landscape, Voxel provides 24 x 7 expert support to our clients from our New York and Singapore support centers.  Engineers skilled in complex Internet routing, OS and application support and hardware troubleshooting are always on hand, well informed and ready to assist in both proactive and reactive situations.

We’ve extended these support options to our Private Cloud implementations — allowing clients to take advantage of our global NOC and support team to monitor and proactively address issues in Voxel or non-Voxel hosted infrastructure, as well as monitor usage and performance patterns.

The other key advantage that an active service provider such as Voxel has in servicing the needs of a hybrid or private cloud customer is our global IP backbone and network, now available in nearly 20 key Internet hubs around the world.  Voxel can act as an on-ramp to the Internet for a private cloud installation or provide more complex inter-connections, such as layer 2 extensions into our public VoxCLOUD (including announcement of shared IP address space, for example), or multi-location Private VoxCLOUD locations for disaster recovery.   Network flexibilities (and just plain abilities!) are key to a successful hybrid cloud environment and Voxel’s 10 years of experience in interconnection, and existing network footprint, are what enable us to deliver cloud solutions with unrivaled depth and flexibility.

So far, we think that hosted infrastructure companies such as Voxel offer a clear value proposition for the implementation, on-going support and maintenance of Private or Hybrid Cloud installations.  The technologies are “battle proven” in our demanding and successful public cloud, fully supported by qualified engineers 24 hours a day and are constantly innovated to meet the needs of the marketplace.

We look forward to working with our clients and partners on Private Cloud opportunities in the months ahead.

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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.

Customers can now take advantage of:

• Transparent and cost competitive bandwidth pricing with fully burstable, 2 x 1Gbps per server network ports.
• Global CDN delivery via VoxCAST with each and every account.
• Local cloud servers and dedicated servers, available through our online control panel, desktop Adobe AIR application or REST-based hosting API.
• 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.

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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

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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:

• TheStreet.com, “Cloud Computing Gets Costs Down to Earth“
• TMCNet, “2010 Tipping Point for SMB Use of Cloud Computing“

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.

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We’ve been super lucky to have visits from some of our clients here at our Lower Manhattan offices — but over the past year, Voxel headcount has been going up and our offices haven’t kept pace with our need for sys-admin space, sales offices and developer desks. As such, we’ve recently started work on the floor below us here at 29 Broadway (just south of Wall Street, across from that big Wall Street Bull). It’s going to be noisy and dusty for the next month or two, so please excuse any jack hammering you hear when calling our support or sale teams in New York.

We hope to have a house warming party in December sometime so make sure to look us up if you’ll be in the NYC area. The space boasts a cool outdoor patio, great views of the WTC rebuilding site and a connecting staircase to our current floor. Some pictures attached so you can all see the progress.

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Inc.com recently announced its annual 500|5000 list and Voxel placed in the top 15% of companies in the list.  We hit no. 82 for IT companies and 623 on the complete list.  You can read more about Voxel’s growth numbers and overall placing in our self-touting press release, online here.

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