[asharp]

Not exactly innovative? Interesting.

Would you mind telling me what gave you that impression?

The most common reaction we get is that we should sell off our tech and not bother being a service provider. Mostly because we are, at the end of the day, a tech company.

Just to take a moment to explain.

From the point of view of the consumer:

- I want to make a virtual server on demand. It must be HA, must have hard disks that are reasonable and I need out of band management in case I lock myself out. - I need a proper virtual network on demand. I need to be able to set my own ip addresses, use multicast (say for db replication for rack), etc. I want to be able to have multiple virtual networks, attach multiple networks to the same machine. I want to be able to connect up over MPLS or a crossover into one of these virtual networks.

Basically, people don't want randomly crippled servers. They want a virtualised datacenter. Can any other provider do this, at scale? We call this the virtual datacenter paradigm and we think that this is the future for cloud.

It's also basically impossible to build, which is surprisingly convenient.

Disclaimer -> I'm Alex Sharp, VP Development at OrionVM.

[nl]

Forgive me, I probably have a very superficial understanding of what you do, and additionally I get all the Australian "Cloud" server providers confused.

I thought you were mostly doing the Citrix Cloud.com platform (which manages most of the setup you discuss), on Xen hypervisors.

I'm not discounting the engineering effort here, and I'm sure there is something I's missing.

Disclaimer -> I work for a (very) indirect competitor.

Edit: further discussion makes it clear you have built your own storage platform. That is innovative, but isn't exactly clear from your website.

[asharp]

Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans. CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san. Most of the others are all Vmware and such, all on fairly standard hardware.

And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....)

But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way: - Take a standard HPC cluster - Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks - Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes - Build on a full cloud orch stack on top.

This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper.

So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.

[nl]

Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans

Yep, I think their storage API is Atmos. (I should say that I think EMC Isilon is very cool, but I don't know a lot about Atmos)

CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san

They built out a ZFS SAN right?

[asharp]

Isilon has damn awesome tech, albiet stupidly expensive. Atmos is absolutely horrific in most senses of the word.

iirc. Ninefold has a bunch of "cheapie" Dell EMC units, hence their troubles awhile back. Don't quote me on it though.

CloudCentral did in fact build a ZFS San, which they used to great effect.