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NephoScale Jumps Into IaaS Cloud Market: Page 2 of 2

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.