CloudSigma

CloudSigma Ltd. is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) company headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland.^[1] The company has cloud locations in Zurich, Switzerland, San Jose, California, Washington, DC, Miami, Florida and Honolulu, Hawaii. It hosts its servers in the Equinix data centres, as well as, it is powering the DRFortress cloud in Hawaii. CloudSigma provides services on a utility computing basis with open networking and software layer. End user remain in full administrative control and are able to managed their virtual instances via its web based provisioning portal or via API created by the company itself.

Business model

CloudSigma targets customers from all over the world due to its geographical presence and strategic expansion. CloudSigma offers unbundled resources and prices.^[2] The billing was designed to keep this level of flexibility and transparency provided by the resource provisioning which eliminates paying for idle capacity. Customer are able to adjust the capacity levels per their exact needs at any point in time, scale out on demand, plan capacity utilization in the long term and purchase subscriptions based on their demands.

CloudSigma employs a combination of API access and a browser based graphical user interface web console. The company sells four products, CPU, RAM, computer data storage and data transfer all price by unit per hour. The company also employs varies prices in relation to the utilization rate of their cloud. If one is prepaying for capacity this means that you subscribed for a defined capacity volume for a defined period of time. The time and resources size had been chosen by you in advance before purchasing them. When running on "Pay-per-Use" or "Burst", customers benefit from being able to spin up a number of VMs on demand and scale out for short period of time, such as minutes and switch them off later or delete them. The system is set to check capacity utilization levels on a 5-minute basis. For instance, if you one runs a VM for 15 minutes and then destroys it/turns it off, the customer is charged only for these 15 minutes. Once having completed the check, the next 5 minutes the system will be charging the customer based on the utilization level of the previous 5 minutes. The process repeats until the VM is turned off and no more capacity is consumed. This Burst model is suitable if you want to cover your occasional computing needs on top of the permanent one.

Platform

Virtualisation on the CloudSigma platform is built on a Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor built into the Linux operating system. Using their in-house cloud stack expertise, CloudSigma developed custom Hypervisor optimizations,^[3] which ensure maximum Compute performance for VMs running on our infrastructure.

Virtual machines are allocated real, physical cores. This ensures that a given process running inside the VM always runs on the same processor. By doing so, any data which is on the CPU cache is always readily available for reuse by the CPU. Prior to CloudSigma’s development of this optimization, a CPU operation could be executed by a different CPU each time. This would result in CPU cache misses, meaning that the data would then have to be fetched from RAM, hugely degrading performance.

Additionally, VMs are granted access to the bare metal aspects of the CPU. The entire CPU instruction set is available to the VM, including SIMD extensions, which is especially valuable for end users requiring real time audio/video processing and other multimedia data processing. SIMD instructions can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. As a result you are able to customize the size of your CPU's core. the minimum is 1 GHz. For example, if you get 3 GHz of CPU, you may wan to have those 3 GHz spread over 1,2 or 3 separate virtual CPU cores.

CloudSigma’s KVM optimisations also allow for NUMA topology ^[4] to be exposed to the guest VM. With NUMA, each CPU core on a processor is assigned a defined amount of RAM, which it can access faster than it can access the remaining general purpose memory pool. CPU throughput and I/O are faster when the virtual machine can take advantage of the characteristic. Making NUMA available can improve a virtual server's performance by 30%. The guest OS can take advantage of this in order to optimize memory access hence maximise CPU-cache utilisation. CPU cache hits are increased, resulting in greatly improved performance.

CloudSigma have also enabled QEMU–VIRTIO,^[5] also known as para-virtualisation. This technology enables a VM to emulate only the minimum required parts of the real IO device, thus reducing virtualisation layers, hence maximizing performance. The guest OS sees just enough of the physical architecture in order to perform optimally.

Recently CloudSigma introduced a hybrid cloud offer ^[6] that allows customers to connect their existing infrastructure to CloudSigma public cloud via private connectivity, thus adding large scale public infrastructure as a service to elastically burst out of existing private cloud, achieving cost optimization as well as increasing reliability and security.

Furthermore, by making u of CloudSigma’ s existing multiple Internet connectivity lines, the company offers a Network-as-a-Service product, complete with intrusion and DDoS protection, giving customers managed high availability public Internet access for their racks in the data center.

Greener computing

The company has been vocal in the area of environmental responsibility within the industry. The increasing impact of server and data centre operations on global greenhouse gas emissions was highlighted by Greenpeace in early 2010.^[7] In June 2010 announced that the company was adopting a carbon neutral policy for its entire operations with a three-step approach to environment impact of 'Eliminate, Mitigate, Offset'. The company offers the only certified carbon neutral cloud servers.^{[8][9][10][11][12]}

News

Oracle Solaris and OpenStack at Oracle Open World 2014 ^[13]

CloudSigma Launches Native Oracle Solaris-Based IaaS Offering for the Enterprise ^[14]

Cue The 'Safely Move From Rackspace' Pitches--Here's One From CloudSigma ^[15]

How Niche Cloud Providers Compete With AWS, Google And Microsoft ^[16]

CloudSigma Enhances Hybrid Cloud Solutions with Equinix Cloud Exchange ^[17]

European Providers to Support a New Cloud Computing MarketPlace for Science, Building on the Helix Nebula Initiative ^[18]

CloudSigma Advances Data Recovery in the Cloud with Snapshot Management Technology ^[19]

CloudSigma Shortlisted for the 2013-14 Cloud Awards Program ^[20]

See also

• Cloud infrastructure
• Cloud computing
• Public cloud
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
• Rackspace Cloud

References

External links

• CloudSigma Corporate Website