Voxel Enters the Cloud Computing Market

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, August 14. 2009 at 04:10 PM EDT 1 comment

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

• Login to Rate

Voxel is branching out from its business as a managed-hosting and CDN provider to offer cloud-computing services, putting it up against similar offerings from Amazon Web Services LLC and Rackspace Managed Hosting .

Voxel is touting its new VoxCLOUD cloud-computing service, which operated as "SilverLining" while it was in alpha testing, as the only service of its kind to have a presence in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

While the company has long had a presence in the U.S. and Europe, its Asian operations started in earnest in May, when Voxel went live with its first point of presence (POP) in Singapore.

Another key differentiator for Voxel is its ability to offer both dedicated managed servers and virtualized servers to its customers and enable those customers to manage both infrastructures through APIs and a common desktop control panel built on AIR, Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)'s rich Internet application (RIA) platform.

"It's about mixing and matching traditional infrastructure with cloud infrastructure, and making it into one seamless infrastructure," says Voxel CEO Raj Dutt. "If they've got physical infrastructure and cloud infrastructure, they can view both side-by-side in our control panel."

"The point should be made that the amount of CPU you get for 10 cents an hour [with Amazon] hasn't changed in three years, but processor speeds have doubled at least once, and maybe twice in that time," Dutt says.

In contrast, Voxel is coming to market with a price performance equation that is based on the processing capacity of today's chips, Dutt says. And unlike Amazon, which hasn't changed its pricing since its Electronic Computing Cloud (EC2) launched, Voxel plans to re-calibrate prices as time goes on.

"We believe the cost equation should get better over time," Dutt says.

One other key advantage that Dutt talks up is universal pricing for data transfer across all of Voxel's offerings. The company's Universal Transfer pricing treats all data the same, blending bandwidth from dedicated and virtual servers, as well as the company's CDN, into a single bandwidth line item.

The pricing structure automatically adjusts based upon the amount of bandwidth a customer uses, so they don't need to worry about negotiating bandwidth commitments beforehand. Prices start at 20 per GB for the first 10,000 GB, and go as low as 9 cents a gig for customers that are pushing 500,000 GB or more.

That price stands regardless of geography, which is a key differentiator, particularly in the Asia-Pacific market where bandwidth costs are much higher than in the U.S. or Europe.