Hosting companies talk about their various cloud services
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January 7, 2012
Amazon wants the IT community to know a bit more about its cloud computing services, storage, and other related enterprise
services that are sold under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) brand.
First, the company said that with the opening of its new AWS data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil in mid-December, the
company has doubled its AWS data-center footprint.
Amazon ended 2011 operating an AWS data center in Northern California for companies on the West coast of the U.S., another
one in Northern Virginia for the East coast, one in Singapore for the Asia/Pacific region. Then another one in Dublin, Ireland,
to serve Europe.
Last year, another AWS center was opened in Tokyo, followed by a special super-secure cloud for the U.S. federal government
in Oregon, another center in an undisclosed location in Oregon that offers prices that are 10 percent lower than the California
center.
Amazon also opened up seven new CloudFront edge locations last year, which are content-delivery network (CDN) services
that front-end AWS data centers to speed up applications.
Amazon doesn't disclose how many servers it has operating the various AWS services or where they are located, but
executives will toss out this statistic-- every day through 2011, AWS added the same amount of server processing capacity,
on average, than it took to run the Amazon online retailing operation in 2000, when it was a $2.76 billion company.
"Simply getting the racks installed inside the data centers and getting them powered up is a challenge in by itself,"
says James Hamilton, a vice president and engineer on the AWS team.
But Amazon isn't alone in its quest to provide reliable cloud services to the enterprise community. In 2009, Sun Hosting
completed the building and launch of its extensive cloud hosting services. And also last year,
Canadian-based Avantex launched its own range of enterprise cloud computing services.
Coming back to Amazon, during 2011, AWS provided cloud computing services to over 100 U.S. government agencies, and it
also doubled the number of CloudFront customers to over 20,000. That last number is probably a very good indicator of the
companies doing some computing on Amazon, Sun Hosting and Avantex clouds, and therefore paying them big money for various
compute, storage, and auxiliary IT services.
However, all three companies won't divulge their number of customers using their cloud services, and they won't offer
any sales numbers either. One interesting statistic that Amazon has consistently delivered is the number of unique objects
stored across its Simple Storage Service (S3) storage cloud.
Back in early 2006, shortly after the S3 service launched, there were 200 million objects crammed into its disk arrays.
A year later, it exploded to 5 billion objects, and then kept right on exploding to 18 billion in the first quarter of 2008,
and 52 billion by the first quarter of 2009.
The peak number of requests to get files across S3 peaked at around 70,000 requests per second, according to Amazon.
Amazon's S3 customers continue to swell the number of objects by a factor of two or three per year. Amazon had 262 billion
objects in S3 at the end of 2010, and now says it ended 2011 with 566 billion objects, more than doubling its 2010 load.
Amazon also says that S3 was peaking at over 200,000 requests per second earlier in 2011 and was hitting 370,000 requests
per second as the year came to an end, so requests are growing a little faster than the object count. Sun Hosting and Avantex's
numbers are a bit lower, but still in a close range nevertheless.
It would be interesting to find out just how much capacity those 566 billion objects take up and how many servers are
needed to drive it. But any of these three companies won't talk about that because that is confidential information.
With Amazon announcing automatic S3 object expiration in December, the object count growth in S3 could go down significantly.
This is good news for both Amazon, Sun Hosting and Avantex, who will only be storing data that is actually perceived as being
useful.
And what the trio isn't discussing either is how much revenue cloud services are raking in, how much investment it takes,
and what kind of profits it generates.
The three cloud hosting providers break out media sales, electronics and other merchandise sales, and then a generic other
sales, with "other" including cloud, marketing and promotion, sales generated through co-marketer affiliate sites, and interest
and other fees. In the case of Sun Hosting and Avantex, about 35 percent of their cloud services sales come from their extensive
network of cloud resellers located in more than 50 countries worldwide.
It is hard to say if the cloud represents the lion's share of this "other" category, but it is tempting to believe so.
In 2008, Amazon booked $19.2 billion in sales and $542 million in "other" revenues, and in 2009, Amazon grew by 27.9 percent
to $24.5 billion and the "other" category grew by 20.5 percent to $653 million.
And for all three cloud services providers, the growth is accelerating rapidly. It will be interesting to see the sales
numbers that 2012 will bring. One thing is almost certain for all three companies: they should be a lot higher.
Source: Amazon, Sun Hosting and Avantex.
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