

New Amazon EC2 competitor - SoftLayer launches CloudLayer - sadiq
http://www.softlayer.com/press_2009_05_04.html

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mdasen
SoftLayer's real advantage seems to be in bandwidth. Offering bandwidth at
$0.10/GB or cheaper in bundles, their CloudLayer Storage can offer some nice
savings over S3 depending on what you need.

Likewise, while they haven't published their CloudLayer Computing prices yet,
the plans do include 2,000GB of outbound bandwidth and free incoming bandwidth
which is potentially a huge cost savings over EC2 since 2,000GB of bandwidth
would cost $360 on EC2.

SoftLayer tends to have a wonderful reputation with many YC companies choosing
it for their hosting. I'm not sure I'd want to be one of the first customers
on this new service, but I'm definitely glad it's happening. If nothing else,
hopefully it will put pressure on Rackspace and Amazon.

~~~
jeremyw
Another real advantage is that you can mix generic Xen instances with custom
dedicated hardware (for specialized problems) -- all on the same, fast private
net.

I've pushed a lot of backend bits between different server lots there, and my
private vlan was solid, minus acceptable hiccups.

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datums
Looks like they are going to launch, the EC2 side of things won't be available
till May 11th. I hope their cloud private network is not the same as the
server private network. They have major issues with the private network and if
you're site is connecting to a private network address for db, you are
screwed.

~~~
jbyers
Curious to know what issues you've had with SL's private network? We have more
than twenty servers spread across Dallas that rely heavily on their private
network. HTTP, MySQL, memcached, etc. Peaks into the hundreds of Mbps. While
there have been hiccups, it's generally been fine.

~~~
whyleyc
+1 for the SL private network. Minus (minimal) outages, it's been excellent
for us over the past 2 years.

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delano
There's still some crucial information missing from this press release (prices
and API) but from the information that is there CloudLayer looks like more of
competitor to Slicehost and GoGrid than EC2. There's a big difference between
launching a server in <60 seconds (EC2) and 5 minutes (CloudLayer).

~~~
zmimon
> There's a big difference between launching a server in <60 seconds (EC2)

Do you achieve that in practice with EC2? I find 3 - 4 minutes is typical and
as bad as 10 minutes is not uncommon.

~~~
delano
10 minutes, wow. I've only experienced that with Windows instances (especially
in eu-west) which I rarely use. Solaris instances are slower too but those are
still considered beta.

I've been working on a development tool for EC2 for the past few months so I'm
starting and shutting down instances almost every day. All of the Linux
instances I've started have come up in less than a minute and usually around
30 seconds.

Keep in mind, if you're using a custom image or one that's been modified it
could take longer depending on how large the image is (lots of preinstalled
software) and what scripts are running on startup.

~~~
zmimon
You hit the nail on the head - most of my instances are windows because I'm
using them to run a small piece of windows software on demand. Didn't know
there was a difference. Here's hoping they get a bit quicker as time goes by
(maybe there's just not a large enough pool of them yet).

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tdavis
This is awesome. I was getting ready to migrate us to EC2 for the reserved
instance savings, but we're already with SL so it might be cheaper to stay if
they're offering monthly plans (which is basically like reserved). Can't wait
for pricing info!

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jf
Looking at their S3 competitor, I can't seem to find any documentation on how
you actually place data onto their storage system. They mention WebDAV, FTP,
and "API", and Blackberry/iPhone applications. I couldn't find any more
details than that.

~~~
wmf
[http://http.cdnlayer.com/softlayerweb/PS_CLStorage_GettingSt...](http://http.cdnlayer.com/softlayerweb/PS_CLStorage_GettingStarted.pdf)

I don't see any API; looks like a Web interface only.

~~~
tlrobinson
That seems odd. Surely there's an API?

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mtw
the actual link is <http://cloudlayer.com> (it's going to be their homepage on
May 11th)

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mrkurt
I'm pretty sure I just read my quota of (tm)s for the month.

In other news, it sure would be nice to see a list of places they have a CDN
presence. Their CDN seems pretty limited as is, though. 24 hour sliding
expirations for the origin service? Yuck.

~~~
jbyers
They partner with Internap for their CDN:

<http://internap.com/flash/maps/overview_map.html>

More details on the service:

[http://internap.com/cdn-services/deliver/http-content-
delive...](http://internap.com/cdn-services/deliver/http-content-delivery-
service.html)

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zemaj
You know what someone needs to build; a cloud agnostic layer. A standard API
that translates across all these cloud companies.

It would reduce migration barriers and help drive down the price.

~~~
wmf
Several such efforts are underway; OCCI looks the most promising.

<http://www.occi-wg.org/>

~~~
zemaj
Awesome! Thanks for the link.

