cloudsigma

OK fair enough. Most public clouds don't use VMWare for cost reasons. It would be cheaper than some of the other commercial systems alluded to but still a significant cost compared with other virtualisation platforms. Its also using a proprietary format so you can't mix and match (whereas we are using RAW ISO files). Finally, you'll need VMWare qualified staff instead of regular sys admins. That's another incremental cost that isn't insignificant.

Best wishes,

Patrick

You can use ButterFS in conjunction with Sheepdog to achieve de-duplification, snapshotting etc. There are a number of choices of combinations but ButterFS is definitely one option.

Patrick, CEO, CloudSigma

Yes I agree with your points. On our 1U boxes we run 8 drives in RAID6. On our 2U boxes we run 22 drives in RAID6 + 2 hot spares. So we use a similar approach in having hot spares on the bigger boxes.

As pointed out in the article, using distributed block storage means you need a pretty high performance storage network and low latency is just as important as high bandwidth.

We already have a physically separated storage network that runs in parallel to our public network. This is used primarily for drive traffic over iSCSI. We have a standard gigabit redundant network for this. As a physically separated network it means we don't get data integrity issues caused by DOS for example.

Moving to distributed block storage will mean we will upgrade our storage back-end to either 10Gbps Ethernet or Infiniband. The advantage of Infiniband is that as a cloud provider we will have essentially a large grid which is what Infiniband is meant for. We can also use 40Gbps per port so with dual networking can go up to 80Gbps relatively cost effectively. Just as important is the super low latency. Suffice to say we are ahead of the software on this one :-)

I think its important to point out that as storage moves to these sorts of systems it will be come increasing difficult to replicate such a setup in a redundant fashion on dedicated hardware. As a cloud provider we spread the cost over many customers.

Best wishes,

Patrick, CEO, CloudSigma

Just to come back on the point regarding NFS versus iSCSI: - proprietary systems like IBM's, HP etc. are both expensive and complicated. This violates our 'simple problems' mantra as well as having cost implications. - our IaaS platform has an open software layer with sole root access granted to the user. That has huge security and privacy implications for our users i.e. they have access to their data, we as a vendor don't (except for physical access which is highly restricted and monitored). It means we see customer drives as block storage devices. We can't see their file systems. NFS can we implemented by a customer on top of our platform but not by ourselves. We do in fact have many users of NFS in our cloud. Its our job to manage the storage at the block device level. As a vendor we are a 'pure IaaS' provider. We don't reach into the software and networking layers wherever possible. Its a fundamentally different approach giving our customers the same sort of control over their computing as they would with a dedicated set-up. - DRBD has de-duplification. For a public cloud like ours this will save us a lot of space, more than the replication introduced. Why? We just RAID6 already so replication won't be higher with DRBD (we will swap RAID6 for DRBD). We have thousands of identical operating systems running concurrently with their own distinct copies (each of our cloud servers is a complete stand alone OS on its own block device, again for privacy/security reasons).

So, we believe that a move from our current set-up to distributed block storage will actually REDUCE costs overall no increase them. We will of course have the added convenience and elimination of single points of failure in storage that distributed block storage entails.

Best wishes,

Patrick CEO CloudSigma

All our pricing is available at http://www.cloudsigma.com/en/pricing/price-schedules .

Best wishes,

CloudSigma

Thanks for the full feedback.

Hybrid Web Cluster is offering a PaaS product sat on top of our pure IaaS offering. We have an open software and networking layer which allows customers such as Hybrid Web Cluster to build quite powerful set-ups on top of our infrastructure layer. I'll leave them to comment on their expected pricing and model.

In terms of pricing from CloudSigma, our cost to customers is $0.18 per GB of usable space. All our resources are unbundled so you purchase them in transparent units independently unlike other IaaS platforms. That eliminates a lot of waste. The storage is fully persistent, high performance storage in RAID6. We use top end disks and hardware RAID controller cards to deliver high performance storage for users. Bear in mind that that price: - is for one month only, discounts up to 45% apply for subscriptions up to 3 years - it includes all maintenance and hardware maintenance - 256bit AES encryption is available at the hypervisor level - it includes all support - you get a 100% SLA with generous compensation at x50 - you can scale effortlessly - your data is being stored in a high availability, high security data centre in Zurich, Switzerland (with all the reliability and legal gains that entails) - there is a cash flow benefit to not paying everything upfront

Thanks once again for the breakdown.

Best wishes,

CloudSigma