 Meet us in Hong Kong to Chat about Networks, Peering and CloudAugust 27th, 2010 posted by Zachary Smith
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Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts, Press | No Comments » 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” 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. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | 1 Comment »
We’ve started by including basic support for viewing your VoxCLOUD physical and virtual servers, issuing reboots and checking vital device information such as IP addresses, console details, etc. Soon we’ll be adding your monitoring status as well as support for additional device types (VoxCAST, etc). Keeping with the design and philosophy of our hugely popular Adobe AIR Desktop Application (available here), the iPhone / iPad application has a streamlined design that focuses on quick and easy access to the features you need most when managing your Voxel on-demand infrastructure. If you’re a Voxel customer, go ahead and download the app via the app store and give it a whirl! Let us know your feedback along the way. And if you’re not setup for VoxCLOUD, simply signup here and you’ll be up and running on the Voxel global cloud in under 5 minutes.
As I’m now also a proud owner of an EVO 4G, keep your eyes peeled for additional mobile applications from Voxel! Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts, Releases | 1 Comment »  Recent Updates from the Voxel Development Team – New Device Metrics APIJune 29th, 2010 posted by mvenzke Last week we deployed another cumulative release that brought a bunch of new methods to our Voxel Hosting API (hAPI). You can now manipulate payment methods, pay invoices, list all the services on your account including current usage charges, and perhaps most powerfully, you can now retrieve historical metrics from your devices for a variety of data points. Using voxel.devices.metrics.list and voxel.devices.metrics.read, you can view things like Apache connection counts and requests per second; Mysql connection and operation counts; disk, memory, and cpu usage; system load; I/O rates; and bandwidth rates. Not only are you able to retrieve current usage, but also historical usage for as far back as we have records, even using different data point step sizes, like 1minute/hour/day/month, etc. This can be a powerful tool to create your own monitoring applications or to apply alerting logic, even to decide when to spawn new cloud instances based on load or traffic. We’ve also extended hAPI to respond with compressed output when requested, and implemented compression by default in all our example client libraries. As always, this release included some minor bug fixes and additional small features. The complete changelog is below. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts, Releases | No Comments »  Adopting IPv6 for Hosting and CDN Services: How I Spent My Summer VacationJune 25th, 2010 posted by asr I spent last week in the San Francisco Bay Area, attending the NANOG 49 conference in San Francisco, along with an IPv6 implementation conference hosted by the folks at Google at their Mountain View headquarters. My take-away from both events is that we’re legitimately a year or two away from being unable to request additional IP addresses from the registries, and that the time is ripe for access (the broadband ISPs who connect you to the Internet) and content (that’s Voxel and our customers!) to finish their IPv6 deployments.
The turn-out at the Google event was particularly impressive, with representatives from access and content coming together to discuss their IPv6 implementation and challenges faced. Comcast is fully committed to delivering v6 connectivity to the tens of millions of “eyeballs” served, and is sharing their trials and tribulations encountered along the way. AT&T is working on their residential broadband customers, though their lack of a concrete directive or plan is, frankly, a little bit scary. On the wireless side, T-Mobile and Verizon “get it”, though support among handsets, and the chip vendor(s) they rely on, is really sparse. As telling were the organizations typically active in operational fora, but conspicuously absent from the conference. I also had the opportunity to detail our IPv6 deployment and challenges: https://sites.google.com/site/ipv6implementors/2010/agenda/LT_04_voxel-asr-v6.pdf Here at Voxel, our next-steps are clear:
We expect to have the above implemented by the conclusion of Q4 2010. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | 1 Comment »
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.
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! Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in Events, General Posts | No Comments »  Voxel Introduces Hibernation for VoxCLOUD — Suspend your cloud server, go to sleep and pay less!June 7th, 2010 posted by Raj Dutt 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.
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. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | 1 Comment » Voxel Speaking at Telx CBX in New York and Echelon in Singapore in JuneMay 20th, 2010 posted by Zachary Smith
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.
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. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in Events, General Posts | No Comments » As I’ve been working out of our Singapore offices for the past 3 months, one of the most common questions I’ve received from local businesses is how cloud servers are different from shared hosting and VPS offerings. While it’s true that cloud-based hosting is gaining significant ground in the U.S., adoption is relatively slow in most of Asia. According to William Fellows, from The 451 Group, 93% of spending on infrastructure as a service is done by the U.S., 6% by Europe and just 1% by Asia. As such, we’ve decided to organize #cloudchat, an event at Hackerspace, to shed some light on the subject. Our VP of development, Michael Venzke, will be discussing basic cloud fundamentals and benefits over VPS; then delving deeper into more technical discussion points, such as cloud interoperability and automatic development/QA environments. To complement, Dr. Kris Beevers, Voxel’s Principle Software Architect, will be discussing proper CDN implementation and performance optimization in cloud deployments. If you happen to be in Singapore, please drop by. Our experts will be taking your questions. Students, entrepreneurs, local business, developers and start-ups are all welcome. Of course, food and drinks are on us! Event Details:
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