
New Amazon EC2 Competitor: Cloudlayer's pricing announced - atarashi
http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer_computing.html
======
mdasen
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?

~~~
cedsav
EVault is a backup appliance, it has a software agent running on your server
and a dedicated web interface to manage backups. Probably overkill if you just
need snapshots.

We use their iSCSI storage space for that, which is about 75c/GB (free server-
to-server bandwidth). Their cloud storage appears to be even cheaper 25c/Gb

------
teej
Higher prices than EC2? I was hoping for something that would make Amazon cut
their prices or beef up their RAM offering.

To compare:

    
    
        CloudLayer: 1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage - $99.00
        EC2: 1 Core + 1.7GB RAM + 100GB Elastic Block Storage - $82.00

~~~
atarashi
Cloudlayer also includes _unlimited_ inbound bandwidth and 2000GB outbound.
The outbound bandwidth alone would set you back $340 with Amazon.

~~~
mdasen
Not just that, but when you look at the higher-end instances, CloudLayer's
pricing becomes even more attractive. At $300, you get 8GB of RAM and 8 cores.
Considering that Amazon's EBS has I/O usage charges, this is cheaper than
Amazon's Large instance (7.5GB RAM and 2 cores with 2 compute units per core)
with any I/O usage.

EDIT: SoftLayer is also saying that their base CPU is 2.0GHz rather than the
1.2GHz that Amazon's compute units are based off of.

------
sadiq
From a little investigation, it's not really an Amazon EC2 competitor. I'd
consider it closer to Slicehost and Linode.

It turns out the instances are only offered on a month-to-month deal, not by-
the-hour.

~~~
asb
The 'Key Advantages' sidebar lists "Pay As You Go or Monthly Packages". I
assumed they haven't yet announced their pay as you go pricing. Did you ask
somebody at Softlayer about this?

~~~
sadiq
That's what I originally assumed, so I used their sales chat thing.

Apparently the Pay As You Go only refers to the storage and CDN.

------
Erwin
What kind of IOPS/transfer speeds are people getting from Cloudlayer or
similar "disk clouds"? This storage with its encryption sounds secure, robust
but slow. Would one use NFS or some SAN/iSCSI/networked blocked device and put
some kind of distributed file system on that?

Or perhaps one needs to plan an architecture where you never block on any disk
read, writes being usually buffered?

I'll note that my app probably relies a lot on files for data access rather
than throwing everything in an SQL database (and I wonder how Postgres would
fare on such a shared disk system)

------
garply
I'm actually shopping through these different hosting services today, so this
is very timely for me. What I'm really liking about CloudLayer is their
ability to expand my HD storage capacity (a feature which is important to me
as I operate a crawler). Linode and Slicehost don't seem to offer that and, so
far, CloudLayer is looking pretty competitive with EC2. Does anyone know of
any other services that offer that?

The unlimited incoming bandwidth is great too.

------
vaksel
regardless of price and features, any new competition is good for the consumer

------
vicaya
Others should learn from this: free/unlimited inbound bandwidth encourages
people to upload data into the cloud. Sounds like a nice platform for building
crawlers.

