Top 4 Cloud Providers on CloudWiz

Cloud providers seem to be popping up everyday in some part of the world, but some providers are emerging as the key players by dominating all the others in one or more aspects.  CloudWiz - the free cloud capacity and provider comparison tool - has enabled an apples to apples comparison of a number of providers, thus revealing the winners.

Quality of Service - Savvis
A number of compute, network, and storage benchmarks are run by CloudHarmony.org to evaluate the true performance of cloud providers.  Savvis outperforms all the other providers with a QoS rating of 9.71, with GoGrid following close behind with a QoS rating of 9.64.  The QoS ratings are given in terms of GQU (Gravitant Quality Units) which are explained in Gravitant's corporate website.

Infrastructure Cost - GoGrid
While many commodity cloud providers price their cloud services at very low on-demand rates, GoGrid offers the best value for money by providing enterprise class services at close-to-commodity prices.  GoGrid started off as a commodity cloud provider but is soon emerging as a strong competitor among enterprise cloud providers.  A large application of 400 GCUs (Gravitant Compute Units) costs $ 22,491 per month at GoGrid, while Rackspace charges $24,744 per month.  All other providers charge $40,000 per month or greater for the same compute capacity.

Total Cost - Rackspace
The total cost includes infrastructure as well as operations and support cost.  While many companies would migrate to the cloud for infrastructure savings, they would end up investing quite a bit on operations and support.  This is where Rackspace truly stands out from all the others due to their 'fanatical' customer support.  As a result, the total cost for 400 GCUs of cloud capacity with Rackspace is $80,941/month (for infrastructure as well as operations and support), while GoGrid charges $84,448/month.  Amazon comes in next at $103,928/month and all the others charge $125,000 or more.

Cloud Management - Terremark
We've all heard of VM sprawl and how monitoring and governance is of utmost importance in the migration to cloud. Terremark has made a name for itself with a very easy to use management console, as well as its standardization with jcloud APIs.  Furthermore, Terremark's pricing is package based as opposed to VM based which alleviates the need to scrupulously monitor and govern at the VM level.

So, it seems like GoGrid and Rackspace dominate from a cost perspective, while Savvis and Terremark dominate with QoS and cloud management.  This shouldn't come as a surprise since GoGrid and Rackspace are commodity cloud providers while Savvis and Terremark are enterprise cloud providers.

Now, what if we could mix and match?  What if we could migrate our mission critical LOB applications to Savvis or Terremark for the QoS and monitoring features, and at the same time deploy email exchange and some of our dev and test environments on GoGrid or Rackspace?  Well, that's where the CloudWiz tool plugs into Gravitant's CloudMatrix management console that allows a consumer to provision Virtual Data Centers from different providers and then monitor and govern them across the board.

See press releases at http://businesscloudnews.com/applications/351-cloudwiz-makes-cloud-evaluation-easy.html

For free access to CloudWiz or for more info on CloudMatrix, please email
analytics-support@gravitant.com