The Private Cloud service is a dedicated server running a Intel Nehalem 2GHz CPU, 24GB RAM, and 300GB of storage, for $699 per month. Both Public and Private Cloud services include 2TB of bandwidth per month based on outbound traffic. Inbound traffic is unmetered. Both offerings have a menu of options to customize, such as the number the of CPUs, the amount of AM, disk storage and other features. With Private Cloud, customers get a dedicated server, but still share networking, load balancing and firewalling with other Private Cloud customers, which is typical of a multi-tenant service offerings. With Private Cloud, you can run as many VMs per server as you want, the limiting factor being server performance.
The rebranding of Ironscale to Automated Managed Hosting better reflects what the service is offering, which we reviewed in September, 2009. AMH is a dedicated server that attaches to a storage array and public and private networks. You can install one of many server operating systems on the server, such as RedHat 4 and 5, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and VMware ESX server 3.5. We'd expect to see VMware's vSphere offered, but it has yet to happen. With AMH, you can have a server purchased and deployed in under thirty minutes. With the ability to add load-balancing, firewalling and automated server failover, AMH is an attractive service for those looking to outsource their servers.
There are some missing features that give us pause, however. Stratascale only has one data center in Sacramento, CA, and while we haven't heard of any outages with their service, the past year has had a number of highly publicized data center outages with other cloud providers such as Amazon , Google and RackSpace. Putting business critical applications into a service, whether a cloud IaaS or a multi-tenant hosting facility, does involve some perceived risk because the service is out of your direct control, but like your IT department, hosting and cloud providers know they have to provide reliable service or they will risk losing customers. Regardless, we'd like to see additional data centers available, which Stratascale said they are working on. What we'd really like to see is automated failover between data centers.
The other functionality that we'd like to see is a set of APIs that can be used by enterprises to integrate with their management software to monitor, manage and provision virtual machines. Most of the big cloud players like Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace have APIs available. Guy Rosen, who has used all three services thinks APIs are a critical requirement for cloud services so that companies can integrate with their existing management systems. Ironscale did say they will have an API available in the near future.
