I'm glad to see SoftLayer getting into this space. However, there are still some things I'd like to know more about.

For example, Amazon's Elastic Block Storage can be snapshotted to S3 (with at least 3 copies in at least two availability zones) very easily. Does CloudLayer's SAN storage offer such ease of backups? I see EVault is offered for about $1/GB which is really expensive compared to Amazon's backups. Can IP addresses be transferred between boxes? What if the boxes are in different data centers? Is the billing only monthly or will it be pro-rated hourly? Can CloudLayer instances be used in conjunction with SoftLayer's hardware load balancing and other services like that which Amazon doesn't offer?