This week our friends over at Rackspace (RAX) announced OpenStack: an open source cloud compute and object store framework that they’re spearheading along with NASA Ames Research Center, and many other partners. I’ve talked about my admiration for Rackspace before, and over the past few months have had the pleasure of meeting some of their management both here in the US and in Asia.

I think this is seriously awesome, and has the potential to alter the landscape of the IaaS market.

That market is obviously a really exciting place to be right now, and at Voxel our product strategy has been centered around helping our customers take advantage of the best mixes of the old fashioned and the new fangled; a hybrid, flexible and open approach. In order to effectively do that we’ve evolved over the years with the market and started looking more like a software company than a hosting company. That kind of metamorphosis is a common theme for hosting companies that want to stay relevant in an increasingly on-demand world. For such companies (Voxel and Rackspace included), software has gone from being an operational necessity that impacts your efficiency to being a centerpiece of strategy and part of a serious and escalating arms race. In a lot of cases, we had to build this stuff from scratch because it didn’t exist.

But who is this race between? From a market share and market influence perspective, here’s how the cookie crumbles from the perspective of someone who needs IaaS service:

1. Amazon Inc + “ecosystem”
2. VMWare Inc + “partners”
3. “Other Inc + Hosting industry”

Not a lot of choice. More importantly, not a lot of standardization. Plenty of lock-in. At the moment, whether you want a public or private cloud, you are likely going to put all your eggs with either Amazon or VMWare. The rest of us are jostling for the people who don’t.

In the hosting world, we’re used to operating in a highly competitive, fragmented, and saturated market. With cloud, it’s a very different story. The industry leaders in the public and private worlds have a very large chunk of the market, and catching up is a daunting prospect. Unlike other industries, there is just as much raw innovation coming out of the market leaders as there is out of the upstarts. Such is the challenge, even though the market itself is relatively nascent and evolving very quickly.

To me, the Openstack announcement is a recognition of that, and a shot across the bows of both Amazon and VMWare

I think OpenStack has the potential to impact the IaaS in a grander and more swift way than what Netscape open sourcing Navigator did to the browswer market. The Netscape event in 1998 was something I followed very closely. Working at VA Linux (LNUX) at the time on Linux.com, I was around a lot of people who had a lot of passionate opinions about open source, and the Netscape event in particular. It made a pretty big impression on me and was part of the reason that Voxel was born as a open-source centric Managed Hosting provider, which we still are 11 years later. Unfortunately, in the case of Netscape, the golden days of Mozilla/Firefox began years after Netscape was open sourced. This was partly because AOL botched it and partly because Netscape was already on their death bed. It took a long time for the community to define itself (it had to reinvent itself) and rally around Gecko. It took even longer for the product to catch up to Microsoft and start eating market share.

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Part of the promise of cloud computing is the ability to pay for your IT resources only when you need them. Indeed, a key benefit of the cloud involves the idea of quickly provisioning servers ‘just in time’ when you need them, and destroying them just as quickly when you don’t.

Unfortunately, getting to the point of being able to spin servers up and down willy-nilly is pretty hard for most users. There are a few legitimate reasons for this.

1. Firstly, it can be a challenge to automate the deployment of your entire environment all the way from nothing to ‘ready to use’.  It’s certainly possible on most clouds (including VoxCLOUD), but often involves the use of custom images and deployment scripts.
2. Secondly, even if you do automate your deployment, it can take a long time for everything to get installed, downloaded, and deployed.

So in many situations, our customers have decided it’s just too much trouble to discard their servers, and they end up keeping them around more than they’d actually like to. In some ways, its kind of a dirty secret of the industry: cloud providers like it, because it means that the hourly charges keep on rolling.

Here at Voxel, we’ve released a key piece of functionality that we hope our customers will really appreciate: the ability to suspend a cloud server simply by powering it off, and having the data persist. Put your cloud servers to sleep, without killing them.

If you’re temporarily not using your cloud server with Voxel, you can simply power it off (via our API, our portal, or our Air app) and the hourly compute charges stop. Need to use it again? Just power it back on. Do this as much as you want (it doesn’t get much easier than this!) and while your servers are off, you pay only for storage.

Let’s say you’ve got a DR (disaster recovery) cluster on VoxCLOUD. Of course, it would be ideal to only pay for it when you need to fail over to it, but you don’t want to wait a long time for it to come online and get configured. When you need it, you need it now. On most clouds, this means you’ll need to keep your cluster running all the time. At Voxel, you can keep your cluster powered off (remember, the data persists), and simply power it on when you need it. It’ll start booting immediately and be available for use within a matter of minutes.

The cost savings are huge. We’ll use an example of a 10 core cluster with 5 servers with 20GB of disk each. If you kept them on the whole time, your hourly fee would be about $1.03 per hour. With the cluster powered off (ready to be booted up at any time), your hourly fee drops to about $0.03, since you’re only paying for storage and not compute.

VoxCLOUD already offers the best price-performance in the industry. With our new suspend feature, the economics just got better. And more importantly, we’ve put one of the key promises of cloud computing within reach of pretty much everyone.

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Our friends over at Cloudharmony just published a new benchmark, this time on inter-cloud throughput. I think they are doing a great job at trying to provide some much needed transparency on IaaS performance.

In their last benchmark (which ranked throughput to end users), Voxel was ranked as the fastest cloud in the United States (IBM and EC2 came in second and third).

So, how did we fare this time around?

I’m pleased to report that we set the speed-record for inter-cloud transfer — 183Mbit/sec between our cloud in NYC and Linodes cloud in Newark NJ, to be specific. While we’re of course thrilled by that fact, there are some points that should be made that help explain this result:

1) Latency matters! The single biggest factor that can help (or hurt) network throughput is latency. This is why the speed-record was set between two clouds that are across the Hudson river from each other. I can see downtown Newark from our office, and Linode is only a few milliseconds away from us, from a network perspective. You can’t sling packets faster than the speed of light, so it helps to be close. Voxel is the only cloud provider to offer service out of the United States, Europe, and Asia, so pick the location that makes the most sense for you and your users.

2) A lot of clouds rate-limit at 100Mbit/sec, or less As CloudHarmony pointed out, many clouds rate limit individual virtual machines to 100Mbit/sec, a ‘cloud speed limit’ of sorts. With VoxCLOUD, the limits are much higher (as they are at Linode too, apparently). At Voxel we like to joke that QoS stands for Quantity of Service — it’s in our DNA to massively overbuild our network. Maybe operating the VoxCAST CDN has something to do with that.

Next week, we will be making some network-related updates to VSE (the Red Hat based “Voxel Server Environment”). These updates and tweaks will bring further improvements to network performance and throughput, driven from optimization to the Linux stack. Next week also brings a new version of VoxCLOUD (1.10). More about both in a future post, stay tuned!

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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.

See you in Austin!

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Web Hosting Industry Review (“the Whir”) has picked up on our latest announcement on our hybrid-cloud infrastructure service: VoxSTRUCTURE.  Over here at Voxel, we’re super excited about melding the benefits of cloud computing into our total infrastructure product line.  Please have a look at our product page for a quick overview (http://voxel.net/products-services/) and read through the WHIR full article here.  We’ll be posting more as we get feedback from our clients and partners on how VoxSTRUCTURE is being used to deploy hybrid infrastructure.

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A couple of weeks ago, the fine folks at Amazon made an interesting beta product announcement that’s getting a fair bit of buzz: The Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). As usual, Amazons CTO Wernes Vogel wrote a rather informative post describing the new product on his blog. There’s also some good details on their product page.

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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.

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We’re ready to start taking the covers off a secret project that’s been in the works over here for quite a while: Voxel’s SilverLining.

Over the next few months, we’ll be working with a handful of customers, helping them to build their own castles in the sky. By castles we of course mean virtualized servers, and by sky we obviously mean the cloud of Voxel datacenters worldwide.

So, what is SilverLining? We could answer that question in a couple of ways.

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Lot’s of chatter about virtualization, and cloud (oh how I loath that overexposed word) computing. It’s definitely interesting to watch this stuff happen around us..

Voxel, like a lot of our peers and competition, has constantly pushed the edge of “On Demand IT”. The entire Managed Hosting industry has been focused making IT more of a utility, supposedly.

It is ‘what we do’, as they say.

Only it took a company that sells books online to drive it home, and accelerate what we were supposed to be doing all along.

Talk about industry myopia.

Or is it really that simple?

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We booked some tickets today, to Singapore. Since the entire country and government is purpose built for business, it has earned the nickname “Singapore Inc”.

We’ll be setting up a regional headquarters there over the next several weeks.
At the end of the month, Mike V (our VP of Development) and Dr. Beevers (Development Lead on VoxCAST), as well as yours truly will be headed out there. We’ll join Anthony W (Singapore employee number zero), who has been doing a great job getting up to speed on all things Voxel the last couple weeks.

While we’re not looking forward to the 24 hour flight (especially since we’re not flying Singapore Airlines), we are very much excited about getting Voxel Singapore off the ground.

Singapore Skyline

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