 Meet us in Hong Kong to Chat about Networks, Peering and CloudAugust 27th, 2010 posted by Zachary Smith
Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | 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 » 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:
Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in Events, General Posts | No Comments »  All Clouds Are Not Created Equal – A Unix Benchmark of Amazon EC2 vs VoxCLOUDApril 15th, 2010 posted by jsullivan While many things have changed in the cloud computing arena over the last three years, at the end of the day what you’re buying hasn’t: you’re getting a server with CPU, RAM, and some kind of disk. Nowhere is this truer than over at Amazon, where you buy CPU power that’s measured in EC2 Compute Units. Amazon defines these as “… equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor“. On the surface it seems quite helpful that they’re abstracting something as complicated as a CPU and offering you a simple to understand unit. Who wants to look at front side bus speeds? Who cares where the memory controller lives? Storage is storage and you buy it in Gigabytes. RAM is RAM, and you buy it in Gigabytes. So why not sell CPUs the same way? Well, as Intel and AMD will attest, not all 2.4GHz CPUs are created equal. Suppose you want to buy an EC2 instance with four compute units. Since we’re basing this on 2007 technology, this means that the power might be equivalent to a 2.4GHz AMD Opteron 250 (2×1.2GHz), or it might be equivalent to a 2.0GHz Xeon (2×1GHz). Both of these CPUs offer you two compute units. In the real world though, the Opteron 250 is more than twice as powerful as the Xeon. All of a sudden our yardstick can stretch from two feet to six feet. The problem with trying to base a unit of CPU on clockspeed is that it’s no longer (and hasn’t been for some time) the sole determining factor in CPU performance. It’s like buying a car based only on horsepower. On paper the 403hp Cadillac Escalade is more powerful than a 375hp Ferrari F355 – which do you suppose is faster accelerating to 100mph? With VoxCLOUD, you’re buying the Ferrari, and it’s made by Intel. All VoxCLOUD instances are powered by the latest Intel Nehalem CPUs. Let’s compare an Amazon instance with a VoxCLOUD instance and see what this actually means. We’ll take a quick look and compare an entry level VoxCLOUD instance with a Amazon Large instance.
With twice the number of logical cores and twice the clock cycles, you’d probably expect Amazon to come out on top of a multi-threaded Unixbench shootout… you’d be wrong though:
Unixbench Raw Scores (higher is better) In ten runs spanning two days, the lower specced VoxCLOUD instance outperformed the EC2 instance in 2 key metrics:
The most important number of all isn’t found on this graph though, and that’s the cost. VoxCLOUD outperformed EC2 by an average of 7%, while at the same time coming in at less than one third the cost of the EC2 instance. Stay tuned, as next week we’ll have a more comprehensive set of benchmarks that take a look at more than just the CPU. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | 2 Comments » Private VoxCLOUD – Why Buy Private Cloud / Hybrid Cloud from a Hosting Provider?April 15th, 2010 posted by Zachary Smith 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:
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. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | No Comments »  VoxCLOUD Extends Popular Clone Feature; Enables Dynamic ResizingMarch 24th, 2010 posted by James Brinkerhoff Rapid development of our VoxCLOUD product and associated Hosting API is a source of pride over here at Voxel — and today we’re happy to announce the release of our improved “clone” functionality for VoxCLOUD VM’s in all 3 of our global hosting locations: New York, Amsterdam and Singapore. Before today’s release, users had the ability to instantly clone a live, running VoxCLOUD device using hAPI or our Desktop Infrastructure Manager. This feature was hugely useful in quickly scaling out an application or creating an instant development environment of an existing, running system. The clone feature would create an exact replica, including the point-in-time data of a production machine. We’ve now extended that functionality to support creating a clone with differing resource specifications. Although this sounds like a small feature addition, the functionality it enables is huge. Applications or system admins can now react quickly to resize an existing VoxCLOUD server to compensate for increased load, even if they don’t have the ability to utilize horizontal scaling in their application. Simply live-clone your server to larger resources (say, from 2 cores to 6 cores) and shut down your old server. Update your IPs or DNS and you’re in business with a larger, faster machine in a matter of minutes. To read more about our clone functionality, click here to read the full documentation or reach out to one of our Voxel engineers by emailing support@voxel.net with any questions. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts, Releases | No Comments » 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 Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | No Comments » Industry Covers Public Cloud / Private Cloud Trends with VoxelJanuary 28th, 2010 posted by Zachary Smith 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. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts, Press | No Comments » 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. Read the rest of this entry >> Posted in General Posts | 1 Comment » SubscribeWant to stay "in the Know"?  subscribe to our main RSS feed
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Are you in Hong Kong or the region and interested in networks, peering, cloud and other such topics? If so, give us a 
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.
Then, on Thursday, June 3rd at 11:40, we’ll be participating in the 
