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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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:
Thursday, May 6th, 2010 @ 7:30pm
Hackerspace - 70A Bussorah Street, Singapore 199483
RSVP: twtvite.com/voxel-cloudchat
Follow us @voxeldotnet

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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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Voxel is expanding worldwide!  Following the expansion of the lower Manhattan HQ, Voxel dot Net Pte Ltd (Singapore branch)  recently moved into bigger offices in preparation for more staff and expanding regional sales capabilities in the coming months.  This move allows us to continue the growth of our Singapore-based cloud hosting and dedicated server offerings, as well as our Asia CDN (Content Delivery Network) services.

The Singapore staff settled into their new home in late November — a sprawling 2,376 sq. ft.,  office space that definitely has more room than our previous 872 sq. ft.  office at Clarke Quay.  It is really, really big!  The office is located within the Central Business District of Singapore, specifically at 138 Cecil Street, Cecil Court #12-02, Singapore 069538 (Check it out on GoThere.sg).  It is very close to the famous Raffles area and the festival market, Lau. Pa Sat, where you can find multi-cultural cuisines — and probably a good number of the Voxel SG staff during lunch time.

If you happen to be in the Asia-Pacific region anytime soon, make sure to drop by our office and be delighted with the Voxel Spirit in our new and colorful home. We’d be more than happy to give you a tour of our office, as well as our Singapore Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Server facility nearby!  See you around!

Check out our latest office photos…

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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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It’s been a while since my last post, and I’d like to take a few moments to bring everybody up to speed on some significant developments on the Voxel network.

First, I’m pleased to announce the expansion of the Voxel network to Seattle, WA. We are peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange (colloquially, the “SIX”), a not-for-profit organization committed to interconnecting organizations which run the gamut from small research networks and access providers to popular content providers and telecommunications giants. This is an important gain for us; it provides us strong reachability to viewer “eyeballs” in the northeast region and western Canada, long neglected by larger providers as a point of interconnection.

Not to overshadow this announcement, Voxel has also gone live with its Singapore (SIN1) facility, our first deployment in Asia. We are providing our full suite of services, including virtualized and dedicated server hosting and content delivery, out of this location.

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A few weeks ago and after a lot of hard work by Voxel’s elite admins and network commandos, we finally brought VoxCAST’s Singapore POP online, nestled in the Equinix facility in Ayer Rajah a few minutes’ drive from our Singapore offices. With this, web browsers is AsiaPac will see significant improvements in load times for VoxCAST-hosted sites.

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Voxel announced today, via a Press Release, that it has selected Equinix for many of its global expansion nodes, including Equinix Amsterdam, Equinix Singapore and Equinix Dallas.  These locations add to our already extensive footprint with Equinix in the following markets:  New York Metro, Chicago, Ashburn and San Jose.

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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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