Cloud Computing Comparison: IaaS Providers
The IaaS product category has taken off because moving computing capacity to the cloud allows companies to focus on their core competencies rather than worry about buying, deploying and maintaining hardware. IaaS is why Instagram sold at a $1 billion valuation with only 13 employees, and why Pinterest served nearly 12 million monthly unique visitors with only 16 employees. For many companies, IaaS -- and public cloud services overall -- can yield significant benefits, but with an ever-growing number of providers, it can be difficult to know which will be the best choice. This comparison will help IT professionals make a more informed decision about which IaaS vendor to select. –Joe Masters Emison
Guide Last Updated 02/15/13
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CloudLayer, by SoftLayer, offers 10% of your monthly bill as credit in the case of an outage and has a 99.99% SLA. Data centers are located in Seattle, San Jose, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, Singapore, and Amsterdam. VM pricing is based on core size: small, medium or large equals 1 GB, 2 GB and 8 GB, respectively. More Detailed Product Information | |
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Tier 3 maintains eight data centers now, with two more (in Vancouver and Munich) coming online shortly. It supports a range of 32-bit Linux and Windows and 64-bit Windows OSes for its IaaS offering. Free trials are available on request, and SLAs include 99.999% monthly for VMs and the Web-based administrative interface, 99.99% for cloud storage, and 100% for network. SOAP and HTTP API supports both XML and JSON, and for those in the market for PaaS, Tier 3 is behind the Cloud Foundry open source .NET framework implementation. Two-factor authentication is available, but the service is not part of the Cloud Security Alliance Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) program. Import/export limited to vSphere VMs. More Detailed Product Information |
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Dimension Data's Public Compute-As-A-Service offering stresses a single management platform for a company's public and private clouds, with a REST-based API. Dimension supports Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOs and Ubuntu and maintains five data centers: U.S. sites in California and Virginia; Amsterdam; Sydney, Australia; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Hong Kong. Dimension acquired OpSource in June 2011. More Detailed Product Information |
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IBM SmartCloud Enterprise has global reach, with VM hosting in Raleigh, NC; Boulder, CO; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Ehningen, Germany; Makuhari, Japan; and Singapore. Its minimum block storage size is 60 GB, and users can employ persistent storage or object storage in any data center to protect against user-error, node-level failure, or other disruption. More Detailed Product Information |
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Azure IaaS Microsoft has had an IaaS offering only since June 2012, so it's a newcomer in the space. However, Azure VMs build on the popular Azure PaaS service. Besides Windows Server, Microsoft's IaaS offering supports OpenSUSE 12.1, CentOS-6.2, Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, SP2. *Microsoft has not yet completed our product matrix, so all information is compiled from publically available sources. More Detailed Product Information | |
NaviSite |
For backup options, NaviSite Cloud offers tape, agent-based disk backups, and local and remote self-service snapshot-based backups. Optionally can configure Tripwire service for security. More Detailed Product Information | |
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Rackspace Cloud Servers Rackspace's IaaS offering is based on the OpenStack open cloud OS, which counts Cisco, Dell, IBM, and VMware among its many supporters. OpenStack was designed to manage large networks of virtual machines and includes various APIs and orchestration controls. Rackspace supports many versions of Linux, including CentOS, Red Hat and Ubuntu, as well as Windows Server. It offers standard instances ranging from 512 MB to 30 GB. More Detailed Product Information |
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Terremark  |
Terremark's Enterprise Cloud discount plan can yield savings up to 40%. Supports VMDK/OVF OpenFile Format for VM transfers and provides VM templates that include Microsoft SQL with database options. Integration with BMC CLM is on the horizon. Strong security offerings. More Detailed Product Information | |
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Amazon AWS is the big dog in the IaaS space. The company introduced the concept of availability zones and regions and still offers some unique features, like Route 53 (DNS service), ElastiCache (caching service), CloudSearch (full-text search service), Simple Notification Service and Mechanical Turk (human worker service). All information was compiled from publically available sources. More Detailed Product Information | |
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CloudSigma stresses the ability to flexibly mix-and-match CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth without bundling requirements, a system it calls "perfect provisioning." All x86 compatible operating systems are supported; number of cores can range from one to 20, with sizes between 1 GHz and 2.3 GHz. The company plans to add object storage and block storage snapshot/restore functionality later this year. An SSAE 16 audit is currently under way. More Detailed Product Information |
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GoGrid's SLA offers a 10,000% credit on whatever amount you paid during an outage. Its 25 GB block minimum is larger than some, but IBM has a 60 GB minimum. Supports RightScale and enStratus for management. More Detailed Product Information |
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Google |
Google Compute Engine provided the most impressive list of APIs in our initial comparison and supports the RightScale, Puppet Labs, Opscode Chef, Cliqr and MapR management platforms. AES-128 encryption is transparent, happening before data touches local disk or leaves the host machine. More Detailed Product Information | |
Internap  |
Also with global reach, Internap AgileCLOUD boasts seven global edge locations for CDN on four continents. VM pricing is straightforward, at $0.10/hour per core at press time. Usage credits under SLA are 5% of bill for every 30 minutes of downtime. More Detailed Product Information |
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Joyent Cloud offers KVM-based machines and kicks in the first 20 TB per month of outgoing bandwidth free of charge. Customers can replicate, back up, and restore database servers. Joyent provides database-specific functionality for Xeround (MySQL), MongoDB, Riak and Percona databases. More Detailed Product Information |
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Savvis Symphony offers 30 server sizes, varying from half a core to 8 cores, and 2 to 32GB of RAM. The provider offers 5 VM regions, including two in the United States. Supported OSes include Windows 2008, Windows 2003, Red Hat, Centos, Ubuntu and Debian. More Detailed Product Information |
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Virtustream's Cloud IaaS offering is sold direct to enterprises and is powered by its proprietary xStream technology, which stresses high-availability for mission-critical, demanding applications like SAP and hybrid manageability between public and private clouds. The company's SLA promises that data will be replicated from customer primary to secondary data center within 15 minutes. Virtustream has three main facilities, in San Francisco, Vienna and the UK, as well as partner agreements in Asia and the Middle East. More Detailed Product Information |
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Peer 1 Hosting's Zunicore is DB-friendly, enabling customers to create database VMs and reusable database VM templates, back up database VMs, and easily restore databases from backups. Instances can range from one to 24 cores with 128 MB to 73 GB of memory and 10 GB to 3 TB of storage. OSes supported: Windows Server 2008 and 2012, CentOS, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The company does not currently offer a file storage service or native monitoring (you'll need a third-party system). More Detailed Product Information |
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† The sort order of our company listings is based first on how many UBM Tech events a company is exhibiting at, and second on alphabetical order. UBM Tech is the parent to Network Computing. Click here for more information on exhibiting at UBM Tech events (and raising your visibility on this chart!).
What you need to know about IaaS:
How-To:
- OpenStack: An Overview
- Using the Cloud To Manage The Cloud
- How to Calculate Cloud ROI
- Upcoming Cloud Workshop at Interop: Still not sure which cloud platform to use? Then our Enterprise Cloud Platform Workshop is for you. Find out more.
Security:
Commentary:
- When to Pick Up Cloud As A Tool
- Why Infrastructure as a Service Is a Bad Deal
- IaaS a Bad Deal? Not So Fast
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