[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.