Amazon.com isn’t just a pioneer that jump-started the e-commerce business. We also have to credit Amazon Web Services for getting the cloud infrastructure ball rolling. Amazon was among the first companies to offer an Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which happens to have turned the data center paradigm on its head.

EC2 is great for company’s like Netflix.

With its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, Amazon created a new world order for data processing with its dynamic pay-as-you-go computing platforms. It didn’t take long before organizations all around the world clamored for the benefits of this new computing model. However, we need to keep in mind the purposes that EC2 was created to serve. The use cases EC2 serves best include development and test environments and web. Especially beta projects, or projects with heavy peak traffic (seasonal) or projects that don’t require an SLA. EC2 is great for seasonal peak traffic as they can dial up and dial down and don’t pay while they are parked. Think company’s like Netflix. Savvis though is rolling out next month a VPDC product that lets you park and not pay while you sit idle and will provide an enterprise level supporting infrastructure along with an SLA.

Today there are numerous service providers that compete with or offer complementary services to Amazon and its extremely successful and revolutionary EC2 offering. Each does the infrastructure component a bit differently, but their overall mission is clear: cut costs, reduce space constraints, lower management overhead and offer scalable compute capacity on-demand at a figurative, and sometimes literal, flick of a switch.

One such service provider is Savvis, which offers four web services under its Symphony Enterprise-Class Cloud Solutions: Symphony VPDC; Symphony Database; Symphony Dedicated; and Symphony Open.

Symphony VPDC

Symphony VPDC (Virtual Private Data Center) is a public cloud offering of cookie cutter packages designed to support differing customer needs in an all-in-one package that includes load balancing for the web servers, app servers, and the database. While I personally like this offering because it basically provides customers everything they need, the downside is that there are no modifications to the different VPDC service offerings.

Symphony Dedicated

Symphony Dedicated is plain jane managed hosting that will support your platform. It’s a tried and true product where you don’t buy any equipment, and Savvis will manage everything for you. When you need more compute space, just add more servers. They also can run your applications virtualized and your database in a traditional segmented environment. Symphony Dedicated is a very flexible offering.

Symphony Database

Symphony Database is a basic “lite” database hosting offering for organizations running a co-lo or running on Symphony Open.

Symphony Open

Symphony Open is a multi-tenant model like EC2, where multiple customers have their VMs running on shared hardware. Symphony Open is built on a massively scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure and delivers a secure, enterprise-class cloud environment with built-in high availability and automated resource balancing. Open offers a purchase-by-the-instance cost model with a scalable, agile infrastructure that you control through the SavvisStation Portal to add resources as you need them.

The similarity to EC2 ends at the multi-tenant infrastructure. Symphony Open is a more flexible platform in that you can create a hybrid environment where you can put your web server in the public cloud and put your database on a private cloud—all in the same platform. Or, you can put your database and whatever equipment you may have within a Savvis co-lo. Symphony Open provides you with a right-sized computing environment with the scalability and security of an enterprise-class platform, coupled with Savvis’ private or public network connectivity options.

While EC2 is a great product, it’s not for everyone. It’s good for single use case solutions, but once you start exploring more robust solution requirements that encompass legacy applications, Amazon lacks the expertise to migrate those applications and make them part of the overall solution. EC2 is good for organizations that: aren’t required to meet either PCI or SAS 70 compliance; don’t need to run a large database; and don’t care about having an account manager they can talk to unless they are billing 500k plus per year. All of these criteria are intangibles to Amazon EC2. Also cross connects alone for private line connectivity with EC2 are 1k per month.and private line connectivity for a gig port run 5-10k. per month. This basically forces you to VPN, so you need to consider you transit costs involved in transfer back and forth.

In my opinion, here are a few additional items you need to consider before you jump head first into EC2:

• Amazon can’t provide private connectivity (they can but its expensive), private VLANs or “hybrid cloud” solutions.
• Amazon doesn’t allow third-party audits of its infrastructure, although it does plan to obtain SAS 70 certification for its data centers.
• Amazon meets enterprise needs such as invoices on a one-off basis. The company doesn’t normally customize terms and conditions, and SLAs are yearly rather than monthly.

If you are shopping around for a cloud infrastructure provider and you plan to investigate Amazon’s offerings, be sure to consider Savvis as well. Give us a call and we’ll help you choose the right provider that aligns with your current and future needs.

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