Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans. CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san. Most of the others are all Vmware and such, all on fairly standard hardware.

And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....)

But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way: - Take a standard HPC cluster - Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks - Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes - Build on a full cloud orch stack on top.

This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper.

So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.