"Also today, professional domain name trader Winged Media, based in Australia but now with an office in the US, announced a $3 million investment from the Carnegie Innovation Fund."
Aye. I've done work for a startup (flipped, now owned by a larger company) that has a massive portfolio of domains. It leases out directory listings and sells domains. :(
Would you mind telling me what gave you that impression?
The most common reaction we get is that we should sell off our tech and not bother being a service provider. Mostly because we are, at the end of the day, a tech company.
Just to take a moment to explain.
From the point of view of the consumer:
- I want to make a virtual server on demand. It must be HA, must have hard disks that are reasonable and I need out of band management in case I lock myself out.
- I need a proper virtual network on demand. I need to be able to set my own ip addresses, use multicast (say for db replication for rack), etc. I want to be able to have multiple virtual networks, attach multiple networks to the same machine. I want to be able to connect up over MPLS or a crossover into one of these virtual networks.
Basically, people don't want randomly crippled servers. They want a virtualised datacenter. Can any other provider do this, at scale? We call this the virtual datacenter paradigm and we think that this is the future for cloud.
It's also basically impossible to build, which is surprisingly convenient.
Disclaimer -> I'm Alex Sharp, VP Development at OrionVM.
Forgive me, I probably have a very superficial understanding of what you do, and additionally I get all the Australian "Cloud" server providers confused.
I thought you were mostly doing the Citrix Cloud.com platform (which manages most of the setup you discuss), on Xen hypervisors.
I'm not discounting the engineering effort here, and I'm sure there is something I's missing.
Disclaimer -> I work for a (very) indirect competitor.
Edit: further discussion makes it clear you have built your own storage platform. That is innovative, but isn't exactly clear from your website.
Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans.
CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san.
Most of the others are all Vmware and such, all on fairly standard hardware.
And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....)
But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way:
- Take a standard HPC cluster
- Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks
- Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes
- Build on a full cloud orch stack on top.
This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper.
So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.
Hi, I'm Joseph. Another of the OrionVM Founders. :)
To add to what Alex said above..
I think the major misconceptions are caused by the fact that most of what we are doing is done much like a "stealth" mode startup.
We -are- a service provider, but under the hood we are very much a tech company building the next generation of IaaS technologies. That is not to say we won't just be a service provider in the future - but only there is much more happening here at OrionHQ.
For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits.
We very much pride ourselves on being an innovative company and I just wanted to communicate that we aren't an Amazon clone. But this post is getting long in the tooth and I don't want to come off as a "butthurt founder". :P
Welcome to have a chat with anyone interested in what we do, we are also hiring btw! :)
For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits.
Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though.
I see what you mean about BigCommerce. The admin panel is painful (and I've heard that the actual system is hell for their employees to hack on), but they're definitely doing a roaring trade, and the instructional articles and videos they provide along with their actual product are rather useful.
The environment the Australian startup scene is a bit odd. We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa), so we effectively have a little "bubble" in which we can set up paid products without much fear of the existing US startups stomping all over us.
OTOH, I'm not sure what they will do when Amazon opens their datacenter (if that really is their plan).
We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa)
That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. Plus there is always Paypal. (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem)
That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include
this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka
Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't
that big a deal.
I don't see Amazon opening up an AU datacentre for a very long time(and probably never). They have Singapore now which will cover a much larger market then Australia will ever be for them.
However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers.
Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.
Singapore sucks for Australian connectivity. Best case is ~50ms round trip to Sydney (which is half to West Coast US), but some ISPs route to Singapore via the US because the bandwidth is cheaper[1][2] (yes, this is insane).
Yep. Best path through is via SeMeWe3 to singapore which is fairly fast. Most people end up with bw through PPC1 or SX which both end up in the US. People mostly do this because SeMeWe3 is stupidly congested and expencive compared to say PPC1, and most traffic goes through to the us rather then europe/asia.
Also remember that PPC1 when it stops over in Guam can end up coming back into asia via Asia-America gateway/etc. I'm not sure if any of the major providers actually backhaul through there.
It may suck to Australia but Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things which is why I don't see a full ec2 data centre going in. CDN node sure but I don't see anyone launching EC2 instances in Sydney anytime soon.
Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things
No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.
Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.
The only people that would benefit from an EC2 cluster in Australia are Australians. For everyone else its just more latency. It's not a huge market, I worked in Sydney for the past 3 years and I'm very much familiar with it and its recent growth but its still tiny. I just don't see the demand being high enough to warrant anything more than something like CloudFront.
The shipping thing is either:
(a) company has a fear of foreigners, usually instilled via chargebacks from dodgy countries
(b) company sells things that have different distribution arrangements for Australia and the local distributor wants their monopoly.
In the case of (a) use a mailbox service like MyUs, in the case of (b) use a mailbox service like MyUs, then ring up said distributor and tell them how much money they failed to extort from you.
I think half the reason why so many copy-cat start-ups get started and funded in Australia is that the big "proper" startups - the originals - take their damn sweet time in getting here. Since there is a significantly long delay (months if not years), that's plenty of time to get a startup off the ground and running.
The Carnegie Fund’s backing will allow them to develop and launch a new platform, called Protrada. The platform is an aggregator of major domain providers, allowing members to buy, build and sell domains themselves. Protrada already manages more than 150,000 domains.
"Also today, professional domain name trader Winged Media, based in Australia but now with an office in the US, announced a $3 million investment from the Carnegie Innovation Fund."