Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
There was a time where Cloud was a controversial topic, always imposed mixed feelings to businesses, and then 2014 came along and gave the Cloud a red carpet. Businesses are now more likely to migrate to Cloud as security measures and flexibility are more available.
There are the usual suspects when it comes to Cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Salesforce etc. They have been part of the growth of Cloud and therefore are strong mature and experienced Cloud providers. However there are now younger thirsty Cloud start-ups out there that are expected to bring to the table new architecture and methods to the Cloud game.
Up till date, Cloud providers have defined services using their own templates, with a given amount of memory, and storage. Market leaders Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace each do it roughly the same way.
But the younger breed of companies are trying new architectures and more flexible provisioning methods. In the world of Cloud computing, here are some of the contenders to be the next big name in Cloud.
DigitalOcean is based in New York possess an architecture that has the potential to deliver a challenge one day to AWS, given its heavy reliance on solid-state disks and high-speed provisioning. But the business has also quickly learned there is more to Cloud services than a speedy architecture and new components.
Digital Ocean combines 1.92 TBs of solid-state storage per host server, which produces high-speed provisioning for small servers, costing 1.5 cents an hour or just $5 a month. That has most certainly appealed to programmer users. DigitalOcean grew fast between January and June 2013, adding 6,996 servers, with AWS one of the few service providers growing faster than that. Now they have added another 6,514 servers.
It is true that with great healthy rapid growth in the Cloud spaces comes with great responsibilities. Data security is a paramount concern, and DigitalOcean in this initial go-round has shown itself not ready for all the responsibilities that make a large service trustworthy for the long haul. Nevertheless, the young and enthusiastic New York company has speedy servers, bargain-basement prices, and a growing list of tools for developers.
CentriLogic is based in Toronto, and so the company offers entrance to the Canadian market, which has its own protections in place to prevent US Cloud suppliers from storing a Canadian citizen’s health data, due to the threat of US government snooping.
Also, CentriLogic has a growing disaster recovery business, is far reached from the swath of Hurricane’s that the East Coast usually encounters which makes it an attractive location as a backup and disaster recovery site for companies on the East Coast. In some of the hurricane’s aftermath, some companies in the main New York metropolitan area found Amazon’s US East location in Ashburn, Va., too exposed, even though AWS continued operating on emergency power through the storm.
CentriLogic has also built out multiple locations. It has a datacenter in Toronto and two in Mississaugua, Ontario; also Rochester and Buffalo, N.Y.; Bracknell, UK; and Hongkong.
It offers a mix of services, in the manner of SoftLayer (acquired in 2013 by IBM), including dedicated physical servers as well as multi-tenant virtual servers and hosting services. In addition, its ability to offer cross-border availability zones, just might make it a preferred partner for those firms looking for a recovery site and a closer tie to Canadian customers (in Europe or US).
OVH.com which stands for the nickname of private owner Octave Klaba — Oles Van Herman — or On Vous Heberge (“We host you,” in French), is one of Europe’s largest Cloud suppliers. The privately held company is also an expert builder of infrastructure, having taken responsibility for the design and production of its Cloud servers and infrastructure since it started as a hosting service provider in 1999. That’s reminiscent of the approach Google and Amazon took as well.
Being in Europe, OVH most certainly has geographical reach. While headquartered in Roubaix, France, it has opened facilities in the US and Canada and is one of the largest datacenter chains in Europe. It offers facilities in Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Finland.
OVH is a leading-edge supplier with an ability to extend its services beyond Europe. With concerns mounting over NSA snooping among major web service suppliers, such as Microsoft and Google in the US, it may be positioned for a long-term expansion.
ProfitBricks launched in mid-2012, and since then the Berlin-based company hasn’t been heard from much. Nevertheless, it brought a new and highly desirable concept to Cloud computing upon launch: End-users should be able to configure the server they want, not the one that the supplier has pre-configured for them, and pay for it by the minute, not hour.
ProfitBricks allows users to build small up to large-scale, single servers, rather than offering server clusters as its high-performance compute option. That means a customer may scale-up a large database system or SAP application to as far as he is likely to want to go, as opposed to scaling out multiple servers.
PrivateCore is a 2012 startup in Palo Alto, Calif., that was founded built to make public Cloud suppliers able to guarantee the privacy of the customer’s data under all circumstances. It is the brainchild of former security experts at Google, VMware, and IDF.
Their timing may be good. PrivateCore claims it can guarantee their customer’s servers in the public Cloud can’t be snooped on by the NSA. Emerging standards for hybrid Clouds and converged datacenters promise to break vendors’ proprietary hold.
What are your thoughts on the Cloud? And are there any out there that we have missed that you’d like to share with us? We look forward to your comments below!
If you would like to know more about Cloud, we conduct free seminars at our offices with Cloud expert, Andy Forkgen. He has grown with the cloud and understands it’s infrastructure and it’s potential.
Get in touch now, and let’s see how we can make IT easy for you.