NephoScale Jumps Into IaaS Cloud Market

There's a new entrant in the growing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud market that is claiming innovative technology rivaling that of established players such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace and Go Grid. NephoScale says that its cloud infrastructure is built from the ground up to overcome some of the limitations of legacy cloud providers.

NephoScale, which has been in beta testing for eight months and emerged from stealth mode just two weeks ago, introduced on Jan. 11 its IaaS offering. It includes an application programming interface (API) for customers that simplifies movement of IT resources to the cloud.

A key feature of the NephoScale offering is CloudScript, which allows customers to assign applications to specific cloud servers, dedicated servers and storage resources in NephoScale's cloud, says Bruce Templeton, president, CEO and co-founder of the company.
A developer can select the necessary number of cloud servers--which may be multitenant servers or dedicated servers and that are reserved just for them--as well as which operating systems to run, which storage capacity is available and other parameters. All of this can be done from a single-pane control panel, Templeton says.

"Once you've created that, it can be reapplied for restoring or duplicating it to other locations or for testing environments," he says.

NephoScale also offers some of the features that platform as a service (PaaS) providers do,  including the ability to allow a developer to come into the IaaS environment to configure and optimize an application stack for the purpose of building and testing software apps, Templeton explains.Although NephoScale is new, it has a deep bench of experience in networking and cloud computing, including a stint by Templeton at Foundry Networks and his purchase of three Web hosting companies in Silicon Valley. Company co-founder and chief technology officer Telemachus Luu launched the GoGrid IaaS business while at ServePath and, prior to that, spent seven years designing large-scale networks for a Web portal company.

With its greenfield IT infrastructure, NephoScale can build around some of the problems of existing IaaS providers, says Templeton. For instance, other providers may assign a particular workload to a server but will not be able to tell the customer if it's running on a single-core, dual-core or multicore processor. That can make a difference in situations where billing is based in part on the "computing units" assigned to a customer.

"So you don't know if you've landed on an old [Intel] Xeon, [AMD] Opteron or a new box," he says. "Some people do want to have the ability to have that kind of programmatic control that the cloud offers."

NephoScale also claims cloud storage capacity that scales to up to 100 petabytes, Templeton says, and that it bests cloud market leader Amazon EC2, which he said lacks "persistent storage." Without persistent storage, when customers need to reboot their instance in the EC2 environment, they have to take additional steps to re-establish their storage connection.