NZ Cloud Storage IaaS startup

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CloudScaleLtd

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#138625 10-Jan-2014 19:01

Hi Geekzone

I'd like to introduce myself and my start up.

I'm Joel van Velden and i'm the founder of a new startup company Cloud Scale Ltd.

After lots of months of hammering away, we've just launched a cloud storage IasS service hosted here in NZ.

Our unique value proposition is to take Amazon S3 which we think is an amazing service, and build our own API-compatible version for countries like New Zealand which Amazon is never going to build out to. Being NZ owned helps too.

We charge 33c/GB-Month for stored data (3x replicated in a single facility); 0c/GB data transfer in, 26c/GB out.

We also have a free tier to make trying us easy (credit card still required, just like Amazon).

Why would you use us over Amazon?

NZ based, so data sovereignty and legal issues go away or are drastically reduced.
NZ based, so data transfers are fast (on the internet distance affects maximum speed)
We're flexible. Give us a call and we can do a deal. Seriously, if you have a lot of data, call us! Everything is negotiable.
We're locally peered (APE, WIX, etc,) so depending on your ISP you might have lower data costs. (some ISPs (particularly for businesses) charge less for local data and some are even free).
Our data out rates are competitive so use us as a CDN for large files you want to distribute.
NZD so no currency fluctuations. Predictable bills.

Why use us over our other NZ "competition"

No long term contracts.
No minimum spend.
No annoying sales people who want to meet you and "discuss your business" standing in the way of getting a price out of them which you can't publish because it's under NDA!
We actually publish our prices! and actually want your business!
We return your calls, no matter how small you are.

I'll be lurking around here to reply to any comments, and i'd like to hear feedback from any geekzoners on how you find our service!

Edit: Woops, forgot to add our website www.cloudscale.co.nz

Zeon

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#964911 10-Jan-2014 21:05

Looks promising, nice! More details on your website would be handy - it's a bit difficult to gauge your company, infrastructure etc. atm

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billgates

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#965047 11-Jan-2014 11:00

Congrats.

Typo on your homepage. New Zealand customers will also be changed GST of 15%

Should be charged

Do whatever you want to do man.

nathan

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#965049 11-Jan-2014 11:06

great to see stuff like this happening locally with good speeds and connectivity

re IaaS though, that generally means Virtual Machines, which this isn't?

kenkeniff

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#965056 11-Jan-2014 11:27

S3 replicates to 3 availability zones (at least 3 geographically separated datacentres each with different redundant utilities).

How your solution different to a RAID array + S3 API implementation (plenty available online)? If your datacentre goes down you're poked.

I think the big organisations that have the data-sovereignty issues you're trying to address also have the resources to implement the above.

It wouldn't be impossible to implement something similar to S3 (which is probably where you're going), you just need replication between ALK, WGN, CCH and redundant utilities + all the relevant ISO & security endorsements.

CloudScaleLtd

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#965239 11-Jan-2014 21:17

Replying to a number in one go:

@nathan: "re IaaS though, that generally means Virtual Machines, which this isn't?"
We're not doing virtual servers, only storage. IaaS is about the model of billing around a service where you aren't paying for the capital outlay.
The best way to think of it is to compare to electricity. You pay cents/Kilowatt-Hour without having to pay for the power station.
With storage your paying cents/Gigabyte-Month without paying for any servers or any of the other considerable inputs that go into providing a service like this.

@kenkeniff:

Amazon AWS availability zones are within a single city/state and are to isolate against things like electrical faults, not disasters such as tropical storms.
Our solution is very different to a RAID array. Our storage cluster is fully distributed and can take failures of any node(s) without missing a beat. Unlike RAID we can scale incrementally by adding more storage nodes which also increases the IO bandwidth of the whole, unlike RAID where adding further drives to an array results in a limited increase in IO performance (all new data hitting only the new disks).
Data-sovereignty is not just an issue for "big organisations" it is a issue for every company no matter how small. Did you get permission from your customers to export their details to a foreign jurisdiction? NZ law requires a companies business records to be held physically in NZ. The law is a complicated beast, and keeping your data in NZ (for NZ businesses) makes many headaches go away.

As mentioned on our website, our goal is to build out into further data centres around Auckland for greater reliability of stored data, and our storage system is designed for this, but Rome wasn't built in a day. :)

kenkeniff

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#965361 12-Jan-2014 10:58

CloudScaleLtd: Replying to a number in one go:
...

Amazon AWS availability zones are within a single city/state and are to isolate against things like electrical faults, not disasters such as tropical storms.
...

I think this statement is a bit misleading in the context of this discussion.

Amazon S3 provides redundancy between 3 distinct availability zones (=>3 different data-centres, power grids, floodplains etc) so in all likelihood yes it would survive a tropical storm or CCH-earthquake-type event (as it can withstand at least 2 catastrophic datacentre failures). This is why S3 can claim 99.999999999% of durability.

Your solution is currently comparatively S1.

What is your general SLA?

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insane

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#966138 13-Jan-2014 13:44

So have been thinking of this, and think I've worked out how you're doing this

Gluster FS
Open Stack S3 API emulator
REST billing by parsing Apache logs
Any cheap hardware with lots of disk

By my calculations you will make a killing if uptake is good!

CloudScaleLtd

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#967223 15-Jan-2014 01:23

@insane: Close, we do use a lot of open-source, but not gluster. Our service is based on Ceph. When we did our initial sit down we were prepared to write our own gateway layer on top of a distributed file system or database, but eventually we came across Ceph and after doing some reading we realised that it was pretty much perfect. Ceph was designed from the ground up to be truly scalable which is unfortunately not the case with most other systems.
Our hardware is all server-grade with ECC memory, and cheap it isn't. Switches, Rackspace, Good internet, all these cost money. Which is why you should pay us to manage your storage for you!

@kenkeniff: We are in Beta. This is because we feel that we need a second datacentre and that our product is incomplete without it. Additionally Beta reflects that we have not chosen to commit to a SLA at this time until we get feedback from our customers as to their expectations. Nines numbers can get a bit meaningless and unless independently audited are rather useless too.

Zeon

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#967225 15-Jan-2014 02:33

kenkeniff:
CloudScaleLtd: Replying to a number in one go:
...

Amazon AWS availability zones are within a single city/state and are to isolate against things like electrical faults, not disasters such as tropical storms.
...

I think this statement is a bit misleading in the context of this discussion.

Amazon S3 provides redundancy between 3 distinct availability zones (=>3 different data-centres, power grids, floodplains etc) so in all likelihood yes it would survive a tropical storm or CCH-earthquake-type event (as it can withstand at least 2 catastrophic datacentre failures). This is why S3 can claim 99.999999999% of durability.

Your solution is currently comparatively S1.

What is your general SLA?

There will always be a weak link in the chain if things are close. Most likely would be connectivity. I agree that having more than one datacentre would be better but it costs!

Heard abit about Ceph. Would be good if you could perhaps write a blog about your experience?

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CloudScaleLtd

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#967226 15-Jan-2014 02:42

Zeon:

There will always be a weak link in the chain if things are close. Most likely would be connectivity. I agree that having more than one datacentre would be better but it costs!

Heard abit about Ceph. Would be good if you could perhaps write a blog about your experience?

I gave a presentation to the Auckland Linux Users Group back in December on Ceph. Its a very well architected system.
We can offer direct peering to customers who think they need it, but I don't imagine anyone will.