|
Cloud computing has been picking up speed ever since the competition became higher. Many big names have been offering cloud computing services as well as smaller more specialized vendors. Cloud-hosted services have also become a great way for businesses to cut costs, through SaaS monthly subscription vs. outright purchasing software.
But with so many cloud computing vendors and offerings available on the internet, how is it possible to determine which is the right solution for your particular business need? Some of the important factors to consider when investing in the cloud include:
-
Platform
-
Key features
-
Price
-
Scalability/Flexibility
-
Security
-
Reliability
Some of the top companies cloud computing companies have great features and offerings, but how do they compare to other cloud computing vendors? Below is a comparison of different features and key aspects for some of the top cloud computing companies.
Cloud Name |
Platform |
Key feature |
Price |
Scalability/Flexibility |
Security |
Reliability |
Sun Microsystems Sun Cloud |
MySQL, OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, NetBeans IDE. |
More available applications than any other open OS. |
Free for 60 Days. Price arranged through contacting a sales rep. |
Network-scale computing.
Scale, reconfigure, or repurpose your infrastructure |
Offers open-source utilities to encrypt data as well as Hardened OpenSolaris for Amazon EC2. |
MySQL cluster offers 99.999% availabilty. |
IBM Dynamic Infrastructure |
IBM DB2. |
Integrated power management to help you plan, predict, monitor and actively manage power consumption of your BladeCenter servers. |
CloudBurst single 42U rack is about $200,000. Less expensive versions available. |
Highly scalable.
Significant operational flexibility and control. Deploy now and easily scale as business needs change. |
Robust security and audit capabilities. |
Boasts no single point of failure with multiple layers of redundancy built into the hardware platform. |
Amazon EC2 |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows Server 2003, Oracle Enterprise Linux, OpenSolaris, openSUSE Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora, Gentoo Linux, Debian. |
Designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. |
Linux/Unix ranges from $0.10 to $0.80 per hour for Standard on-demand instances, while Windows ranges from $0.125 to $1.00 per hour. High CPU on-demand instance for Linux range from $0.20 to $0.80 per hour while Windows usage ranges from $0.30 to $1.20 per hour. |
Automatic scaling. Highly - increase or decrease capacity within minutes.
Select a configuration of memory, CPU, and instance storage that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. |
Web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to and between groups of instances. |
99.95% availability. A few performance-related outages over the past few years. |
Google App Engine |
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux/Other Platforms. |
No limit to the free trial period if you do not exceed the quota alotted. |
Free quota of 500 MB of storage and around 5M pageviews per month. After badwidth outgoing/incoming per GB: $0.12/$0.10. CPU time $0.10 per CPU hour, stored data $0.15 per GB per month, Email $0.0001 per recipient. |
Automatic scaling. "Massively scalable" App Engine datastore and services.
Sandbox flexible enough for you to break abstractions at will. |
Same security, privacy and data protection policies as Google Apps. |
Generally 100% available, but not guarenteed at 100%. Transparent uptime visual offered. |
Microsoft Azure |
In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. |
Currently offering a "development accelerator" discount plan. 15-30% discount off consumption charges for first 6 months. |
*Pure pay-as-you-go:
$0.12 per hour for computing
$0.15 per GB for storage
$0.10 per 10,000 storage transactions
*SQL Azure database:
$9.99 - basic Web edition (1 GB DB)
$99.99 - Business Edition (10 GB DB)
*Network bandwidth:
$0.10-$0.15 per GB.
. |
Automatic scaling and highly scalable.
Open platform supports both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. |
Multiple levels of security at Microsoft-quality scale. |
Fabric Controller technology reroutes work instantaneously if a server goes down; 99.9% - 99.95% uptime. |
AT&T Synaptic Hosting |
Synaptic Hosting platform virtual hosting solution. |
Use fully on-demand infrastructure or combine it with dedicated components to meet specialized requirements. |
Elastic capacity on demand with no commitments, minimums, or limits. Currently controlled access by request only and further information is sent upon signup. |
When traffic spikes a company website, AT&T scalable utility architecture expands the storage, network and server capacity, then shrinks back to normal when the rush is over.
“Burstable” pricing options for flexibility. |
Suite of Security and Business Continuity Services assess vulnerabilities, secures data and infrastructure, detects attacks, responds to suspicious activities, and provides for non-stop operations. Defense against distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). |
Single service level agreement on availability and response time of the entire service (up to 99.9%). |
GoGrid Cloud Computing |
Windows Server 2003, 2008, MS SQL Standard, Workgroup Edition, and Server 2008, Hybrid Dedicated/Cloud networks, Linux, GoGrid will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. |
Free load balancing and free 24/7 support. |
$0.095 - $1.32 per hour for RAM. Pay-as-you-go Plan, Server RAM hours are billed at $0.19 per GB of deployed RAM per Hour. Free unlimited inbound transfers. Storage at $0.15 per GB per month with first 10GB per month free. |
Automatic scaling.
Total flexibility and control. |
Presence of a professional security guard in the computer server hosting facilities at all times. |
100% Uptime Service Level Agreement. |
Salesforce |
Supports all major development environments and tools including .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and many more. |
Offers cloud solutions for automation, customer service, and platform, respectively. Transparency through real-time information on system performance and security at trust.salesforce.com. |
Pay-as-you-go pricing, with $20/user/month for Enterprise Edition customers and $25/user/month for Unlimited Edition customers. |
Yes - Scales with you, without requiring re-architecturing or data migrations.
Integrations do not break. No intricate technology dependencies or vendor lock in. |
Physical security, data encryption, user authentication, application security, and more. |
facilities are identical and transactions are mirrored almost instantly, making interruption of service related to hardware problems or data issues virtually impossible. Applications will fail over to the other site with minimal interruption. |
|