September 23, 2009, 4:49 PM — The lack of buzz about the recent VMware announcement of vCloud Express is, to me at least, puzzling. VCloud express is VMware's riposte to Amazon Web Services--a publicly available, get-started-with-a-credit-card, IaaS offering. Since VMware is a software company, it has partnered with service providers to deliver the product to market. In essence, vCloud Express packages up VMware technology, surrounds it with a set of APIs to control and manage the package, and allows service providers to offer vCloud Express--it's sort of cloud in a box.
I've been playing with vCloud Express and hope next week to offer some initial technical impressions, but in this post I'd like to focus on a cost comparison of AWS and vCloud Express (I think from this point on in the post I'll call it VCE to reduce typing).
[ For timely cloud computing news and expert analysis, see CIO.com's Cloud Computing Drilldown section. ]
Overall, the pricing of VCE seems pretty comparable, and competitive, to AWS. This, to me, is a bit of a surprise. Most public cloud providers focus on using low-cost kit, often designed to their own specs. Google, famously, uses what appears to be a bare motherboard with components Velcro-ed on. VMware, at least in its internal data center manifestations, is typically provisioned with high quality (and high price) components from topflight suppliers like HP, EMC, and Cisco. When I heard rumors of the forthcoming VCE, I wondered if the use of componentry such as these would force VCE pricing above that of AWS. Thus far, the evidence is that VCE pricing is delivered to market roughly equivalent to AWS. And this pricing does not appear to be achieved by substituting cheap componentry in place of the expensive stuff common in internal installations. Terremark, one of the launch service providers (here in the US, the others are BlueLock and Hosting.com), notes in its specification pages that its VCE offering is based on Cisco and fibre channel SAN storage.
So, how does the pricing break down? Naturally, it's impossible to do a direct apples-to-apples comparison between VCE and AWS, but here is a rough comparison:
|
TYPE |
AMAZON WEB SERVICES |
VCLOUD EXPRESS |
NOTE |
|
Virtual machine -- 1 CPU, 2 GB memory |
$.10/hr |
$.123/hr |
Amazon instance is EC2 instance of one "virtual core with EC2 compute unit" VCE is virtual CPU with (I think) two virtual cores |
|
Virtual machine -- 2 CPU, 7.5 GB memory |
$.40/hr |
$.42/hr |
Again, virtual core vs. virtual CPU, but AWS is two virtual cores with 2 EC2 compute units |
|
Storage |
$.15/GB/month |
$.25/GB/month |
Amazon on sliding scale with descending cost at larger storage use |
|
Data transfer to/from Internet |
$.10/GB/in-transfer; $.17/GB/out-transfer |
$.17/GB |
Amazon on sliding scale with descending cost at larger out-transfer |
I have heard that, unlike AWS, VCE charges for the virtual machine whether it's running or not. On the other hand, when an AWS machine is not running, its image must be stored in S3, which incurs storage charges. Depending upon the size of the machine image, the total for a given machine might be equivalent for the two solutions.
