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  1. #1

    CloudSigma opinions?

    Hi,

    I'm currently finding CloudSigma an attractive option for moving from my current dedicated server:

    * I can fine-tune the resources I need to be better than the dedicated server (although I realize that this doesn't mean it will actually perform better - my thinking is that the redundant storage and self-healing/HA aspects that I don't get with a simple low-budget dedicated server are worth the trade-off)

    * Their infrastructure sounds like it's well thought out (they have soooo much more information about their systems on their site than I have found on other cloud hosters, where usually you get as much marketing speak as you do technical details. In any case, they seem fairly transparent. And their uptime seems pretty decent.

    * Their pricing is great if you can commit to longer periods - even three years will cut your effective monthly rate in HALF!

    I'm not a schlep (I have no idea if that's the right word) for CloudSigma - I swear! I searched here and didn't find too many threads talking about them (they seem to be a bit newer - and that in itself could be a cause for concern). If I missed the definitive review thread, please point me in the right direction.

    Anyone have actual experience with them? Any opinions? I'd be grateful!

  2. #2
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    Have you actually bought services, or just talking about what their website says?

  3. #3
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    You know, I was just going to ask or open same topic. They do seem quite good on information part, uptime and their portal is so much different.

    My staff is actually going through all the setups and load speeds to figure out what their systems can handle with a given resources.

    I will for sure update with outcomes and review after some benchmarks if it ever gets there.

    DEDISERVE
    ----------
    How come pings and traces are quite high at 100ms ?

  4. #4
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    Hi Catbones

    what pings are you talking about?

  5. #5
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    Just a normal ping of the IP address returns at 130ms and down to 75ms... just wondering

  6. #6
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    What IP are you referring to though?

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by catbones View Post
    You know, I was just going to ask or open same topic. They do seem quite good on information part, uptime and their portal is so much different.

    My staff is actually going through all the setups and load speeds to figure out what their systems can handle with a given resources.

    I will for sure update with outcomes and review after some benchmarks if it ever gets there.
    Oh, thank you! Please do update this thread when you have more info. There isn't much info about them on WHT, or anywhere else for that matter (again, somewhat of a concern). So I'd really like to find people with experience and hear what they have to say.

    Quote Originally Posted by catbones View Post
    DEDISERVE
    ----------
    How come pings and traces are quite high at 100ms ?
    Is this related to this thread? If it's not, do you mind taking this discussion to another thread? Thanks!

  8. #8
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    http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/06/cl...ng-part-5.html

    General takeaway is

    • Almost parity costs with AWS at m1.small, however slightly more in others. But you get better performance it seems. LAMP scores at Cloudharmony are 3x better at the same size-levels.
    • Bandwidth friendlier.
    • Smaller instances aren't as heavily scheduled/crippled.
    • Much better local disk access.
    • Downside is their service API uptime.
    • I don't think their API account security is up to snuff.


    Take it with a grain of salt, as that's just the research I've dug up. I'm likely taking the plunge soon myself just to see its performance.

  9. #9
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    At a high level, the article describes that, while there are certain advantages for cloud providers operating data centers in-house, including greater control, capacity, power and security, the challenges, such as geographic expansion, connectivity, location, cost and lower-tier facilities often outweigh the benefits.

  10. #10
    @tchen Thanks for the link and summary!

    @che09 Point taken - sort of... Do you think (or do you think the article suggests) that CloudSigma's particular in-house solution leans on the side of suffering from those challenges or the opposite? I guess I'm asking - what is the take-away from your statement in regard to CloudSigma?

  11. #11
    Thank you for the comments and feedback. In terms of our approach we'd point to a number of key factors:
    - we price transparently in simple resource units
    - we have no fixed server sizes so you can purchase resources efficiently and make servers that directly fit your needs
    - our clouds already run on all 10GigE networking right down to each physical server node
    - we offer high performance on-node SSD storage which is ideal for HPC and other intensive IO tasks (such as databases)
    - our prices aren't at a premium to the market but resource performance is higher, our customers often find they need to buy less resources on our cloud than previous set-ups they had
    - we will be rolling out a number of new innovations on our platform in 2012 designed to enable further increases to performance of computing within our cloud
    - we are an open platform, that means you can run any OS you like without restriction and you retain full sole root/administrative over your computing

    Best wishes,

    Robert Jenkins
    CTO
    CloudSigma

    P.S. Regarding the data centre debate, our position is that public cloud providers should not run their own data centres but concentrate on the infrastructure for their cloud only. It is an argument about business focus and I'd encourage you to visit our blog to read more about our position with regards to this.

  12. #12
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    I spun up one of their free for seven days servers this am. Haven't had time to look into it much yet. With any luck, I'll get to play with it, if work doesn't prevent if.

  13. #13
    Please report back!

  14. #14
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    Hi Anyori,

    Pretty much all of your 13 posts have talked about this provider - why don't you simply try them out and talk to them directly?

  15. #15
    Just wanted to add.
    I try try twice on their free trial.
    Overall, i felt the performance is good.
    Cloud management is good. Easy to use.
    I manage to do my own installation, or you can preload with their preinstalled OS.

  16. #16

    CloudSigma opinion from an independent cloud broker-dealer

    We have introduced several of our customers to CloudSigma, both those looking to do something simple, and those building complex architectures. The commercial way they are setup (choice of CPU, RAM, HDD and SSD, and 5 minute billing amongst other things) makes a lot of sense economically, and listening in on technical calls, I have heard clients say "Your platform rocks". Doing a price comparison with other providers is tough - if you just look at the CPU, RAM and Storage comparisons, they sometimes look slightly more expensive, but once performance optimisation has been done, our clients' experience has been that they are either slightly cheaper, or MUCH cheaper, depending on the use case. I have had a business relationship with CloudSigma for sometime now and have found them really professional and prepared to go the extra mile to get your business. For full disclosure, my relationship with CloudSigma is as a cloud broker-dealer for them. If you want that big discount for a 3 year commitment to use them, but don't want to prepay, we're who you come to speak to. We work with several clouds, so I am reasonably unbiased.

  17. #17
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    I agree that price comparisons are hard. It doesn't help that CloudSigma's virt is KVM and uses the standard linux scheduler compared to Amazon which has a very custom and locked scheduler running in Xen.

    From what I'm seeing, the hardware nodes are extremely lightly loaded (maybe trial accounts were segregated from the rest of the universe). So you get excellent bang for the buck as CPU spills over. My concern going forward would be that it also makes it hard to properly size your VM correctly when the node suddenly gets load. A general rule of thumb that one vCore is roughly a ECU helps, but I haven't been able to test that theory.

    I'll impose this caveat on my previous post saying it performs better.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by tchen View Post
    From what I'm seeing, the hardware nodes are extremely lightly loaded (maybe trial accounts were segregated from the rest of the universe). So you get excellent bang for the buck as CPU spills over. My concern going forward would be that it also makes it hard to properly size your VM correctly when the node suddenly gets load.
    I was testing thems performance and maybe you're right but my thinking that they have not so many customers yet in Las Vegas. Always good performance there. Get Zurich account and all bets off. Performance is 50% as good and changes from machine to machine (even on trial). I guess they have more customers cuz it's their first location.

    Robert, co-founder from CloudSigma answered this with claim it was due to split of drive from physical machine where instance was run. That does explain why disk performance is so low. But that is not answer to why CPU power is also 50%. I hear no response on this so I guess they might really overcommit their CPUs.

    They supposed to have new I/O system coming soon (but not SAN, so if it's not local, what will it be? well no matter what, I hope it fixes bad disk performance). But I guess no solution to slow CPU.

    I think new customers should go Las Vegas, you get awesome CPU but beware that it will degrade badly once they get lots more customer at that location.

    I did lots of benchmark and posted a very interesting and helpful conversation (Renich from LinuxCabal is so nice!) here:

    http://blog.woralelandia.com/2011/10...ou-cloudsigma/

    Btw their control panel awesome i think and complete control of servers and drives is super great. If they can fix their performance problems they will be hands down the only cloud you ever wanna use.

  19. #19
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    That's a good point about Zurich. I was testing strictly in Las Vegas.

  20. #20
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    juenca, looking at your unixbench results at Zurich, it looks like one vCore very roughly equivalent to one ECU when push comes to shove (maybe just a tad better).

    My results from EC2 in case you're curious

    m1.small (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
    Dhrystone 2 using register variables 5378544.9 lps
    Double-Precision Whetstone 925.9 MWIPS

    c1.medium (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
    Dhrystone 2 using register variables 23458569.1 lps
    Double-Precision Whetstone 4263.9 MWIPS

  21. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by tchen View Post
    juenca, looking at your unixbench results at Zurich, it looks like one vCore very roughly equivalent to one ECU when push comes to shove (maybe just a tad better).

    My results from EC2 in case you're curious

    m1.small (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
    Dhrystone 2 using register variables 5378544.9 lps
    Double-Precision Whetstone 925.9 MWIPS

    c1.medium (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
    Dhrystone 2 using register variables 23458569.1 lps
    Double-Precision Whetstone 4263.9 MWIPS
    OK, yah actualy that helps a lots. Which unixbench results are best to look at? I mean, unixbench gives 2 results scores when you have 2 more more CPUs. The first is always lower score.

    Can you say rough pricing of one ECU or the server sizes you posted here?

  22. #22
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    I'll always use the parallel tests because most things I do spawn processes galore or are multithreaded.

    My CS vs EC2 comparison table is below for one year contracts and assuming full utilization. It includes 8GB volumes, and about $5 for EBS IO. It also doesn't account for the VLAN or static IP so you need to tack those costs on. Spot (burst) prices are for the Las Vegas rates (0.011 CPU, 0.0154 RAM, 0.28 HDD)

    m1.small 1 YR - $36.25 vs $42.36
    m1.small spot - $29.46 vs $24.46

    m1.large 1 YR - $152.09 vs $155.34
    m1.large spot - $118.99 vs $83.76

    c1.medium 1 YR - $84.56 vs $80.06
    c1.medium spot - $61.66 vs $44.23

    t1.micro comparisons aren't really valid because of the way the scheduler throttles from 0ECU to 2ECU.

  23. #23
    Thanks for these price comparisons however there are a number of points to make:

    Firstly on CloudSigma you don't have fixed server instance sizes. As such starting with AWS and re-creating that server size in CloudSigma is a false methodology. What you should start by doing is creating a server that actually fits your needs in terms of CPU/RAM/Storage on CloudSigma THEN go and find the nearest fit on AWS. You'll find you will have to over-purchase at least one of CPU/RAM/Storage and perhaps more in order to fit your requirements. This is the purchasing waste that bundling introduces for customers.

    Secondly, most customers using burst are doing ad hoc computing but often re-using the same storage. It is a very rare use case that our customers use both CPU/RAM and storage both on burst. The more usual case is using storage on subscription and CPU/RAM on burst. Again, because most hosting providers over-provision storage in relation to CPU/RAM amounts, working backwards from AWS fixed sizes rather than working forward from your actually computing size requirements on CloudSigma introduces bias to the results.

    Finally, in CloudSigma you have a number of features that allow you to tailor performance to your needs. For example, you can vary the number of virtual CPUs separately from the aggregate core-GHz. For example, a 10GHz server could have 10 cores of 1GHz each or 5 cores of 2GHz each. This means you can match the threads to your application requirements. Likewise we offer VirtIO emulation which significant boost performance. If you run the benchmarks using VirtIO storage and networking you'll see major improvements with this change alone. We also offer SSD storage which provides a major performance boost for operations such as database work.

    Best wishes,

    Robert

  24. #24
    Hi Robert! I'm glad seeing you here!

    Quote Originally Posted by cloudsigma View Post
    Firstly on CloudSigma you don't have fixed server instance sizes. As such starting with AWS and re-creating that server size in CloudSigma is a false methodology. What you should start by doing is creating a server that actually fits your needs in terms of CPU/RAM/Storage on CloudSigma THEN go and find the nearest fit on AWS. You'll find you will have to over-purchase at least one of CPU/RAM/Storage and perhaps more in order to fit your requirements. This is the purchasing waste that bundling introduces for customers.
    I agree and thats why I really likes CloudSigma! But I think you must also accept that it makes much sense to making price point comparison at a CPU/RAM level that is equal between platforms. This lets you know if cost/resource ratio is similar or not.

    Other problem with your suggesting is that HOW do you actually propose to start by sizing a server on CloudSigma? If you read my benchmarks I posted on the link I listed you can see that performance changes LOTS depending on location (las vegas/zurich) and even depending on which machine your on at the same location! That makes sizing impossible.

    Don't get me wrong, I fell in love with the level of control in CloudSigma over resources and sizing and subscriptions!

    Quote Originally Posted by cloudsigma View Post
    Likewise we offer VirtIO emulation which significant boost performance. If you run the benchmarks using VirtIO storage and networking you'll see major improvements with this change alone.
    I did that but I didn't see many change between disk performance in both modes. But its said you will be making some storage system changes thats exciting! I only wonder why you don't respond to the CPU question.

  25. #25
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    Thanks Robert for coming out here and adding some salient points.

    Quote Originally Posted by cloudsigma View Post
    You'll find you will have to over-purchase at least one of CPU/RAM/Storage and perhaps more in order to fit your requirements. This is the purchasing waste that bundling introduces for customers.
    There definitely is much more flexibility in CloudSigma's provisioning. But the forced apples-to-apples comparison was just to compare relative price/performance.

    There are also performance variability downsides to packing VMs of disparate sizes, which are concerns alleviated to some extent via bundling. Bundling can be both good or bad.


    Quote Originally Posted by cloudsigma View Post
    Secondly, most customers using burst are doing ad hoc computing but often re-using the same storage. It is a very rare use case that our customers use both CPU/RAM and storage both on burst. The more usual case is using storage on subscription and CPU/RAM on burst.
    I think that muddles the point as a good deal of ad hoc computing is opportunistic. Keeping a volume on standby is just pure waste, especially if you're numbering in the dozens of servers. Configuration and coordination are typically left to things like Puppet or Rightscale, rebuilding the server from a base image. Hence, this is why the comparison was left as purely spot pricing.

    Besides, the difference in burst storage versus a one year sub was $1.40

    I think you're better served by mentioning that burst prices at CloudSigma are capped, as oppose to EC2 which goes as high as you're willing to pay - should it go higher, the instance is terminated abruptly. I much prefer CloudSigma's spot even if it is a bit more expensive.



    Quote Originally Posted by cloudsigma View Post
    Again, because most hosting providers over-provision storage in relation to CPU/RAM amounts, working backwards from AWS fixed sizes rather than working forward from your actually computing size requirements on CloudSigma introduces bias to the results.
    Actually, the comparison bias was removed in this case by using EBS. Ephemeral storage would be different, and would be more skewed in EC2's favor had I included it.

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