Cloud Providers and Locations

Below is my list of cloud infrastructure providers and their data center locations (as of May 2009):

Cloud Infrasturcture Providers

1. US: Amazon EC2, RackSpace, GoGrid, SoftLayer, NewServers, ATT, Verizon, Sun Cloud;
2. EU: FlexiScale, ElasticHosts, Amazon EC2, ATT, Verizon;
3. Asia: ATT, Verizon(?), RackSpace(?), 21ViaNet’ CloudEx(?);

Further:

1. RackSpace has data centers in US, Europe (London) and Asia(Hongkong), but does not tell you which data center(s) offer cloud computing capability. I suspect it is only within 1-2 US data centers now(update: RackSpace supports cloud computing at its Dallas and San Antonio data centers at this moment, according to RackSpace twitter response);
2. Savvis claims support for cloud computing, but one can not find anything meaningful from their website (the site is almost designed for anti-communications);
3. Sun Microsystem made a big deal announcing Sun Cloud, in particular, saying that they will provide a storage service(similar to S3) and a compute service (similar to EC2). Is this real? Is it still real after Oracle acquisition?;
4. Terremark also claims support for cloud computing. Again, their site is fairly non-communicative. I couldn’t even figure out whether they are offering an infrastructure service or a software product;
5. Integrated Cloud platform providers such as Google AppEngine etc are excluded from the list

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Where are these “cloud” data centers located? Here is what I collected:

1. Amazon EC2: two locations currently (Virginia and London, both are my rough guesses. Let me know if you know!). Questions:
   • 3 availability zones in US – are these availability zones in the same data center, or in different cities?
   • Amazon also has data centers in other cities and countries (such as Hongkong). Will EC2 expand to these places?
2. RackSpace:
   RackSpace has data centers in a few locationis: San Antonio (TX), Dallas(TX), Herndon (VA), London, Slough (UK), and Hongkong. However, I couldn’t find any information indicating which data center(s) supports cloud computing. Or do they all support cloud server? Does anyone know?
3. GoGrid: San Francisco
4. NewServers: Miami
5. SoftLayer: SoftLayer has data centers in three locations: Seattle, Dallas, and Washington DC.
   Though I couldn’t find any explicit information indicating where cloud computing is supported, I suspect all three support it. BTW, I wish some other providers can learn from SoftLayer in using their websites to communicate necessary information.
6. ATT: ATT Synaptic Hosting has 5 locations: Piscataway, New Jersey; San Diego, California; Annapolis, Maryland; Amsterdam in the Netherlands; Singapore. It seems that all these five support elastic cloud hosting on a pay-as-you-go model. A huge drawback seems to be the lack of API support. Or at least I couldn’t find any information from their website. On the other side, ATT has a total of 38 data centers around the world (including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou). Would ATT provide cloud computing support in some of the other data centers?
7. Verizon: Verizon announced CaaS(http://www.verizonbusiness.com/us/products/itsolutions/caas/) in early 2009. It looks good on parper, but there are very few little details available from their website. Here are some of the questions: Is there API available? Where are the CaaS data centers? What is the pricing structure?
8. Savvis: Savvis has data centers in a good list of locations in US (SFO, Chicago, Boston, …), UK (3), Tokyo, and Singapore. But I have no idea of which cloud computing support is and where they are support from Savvis web site. Any cloud API support?

Then in Europe, here are the options:

1. Amazon: UK
2. RackSpace: UK (2)
3. FlexiScale: UK (API is available at https://api.flexiscale.com/current/doc/)
4. ATT(?), Savvis (?) – not quite sure etc.

In Asia, options are much more limited. Here they are:

1. ATT: Hongkong, Singapore, Tokyo
2. Amazon: Hongkong(?) – Amazon does not offer EC2 at HongKong now. Will Amazon do so in the future? Similarly, will ATT offer cloud computing support in Shanghai data center? Will RackSpace offer such in their Hongkong data center?
3. Finally, 21ViaNet: this is Chinese hosting company. It announced something called “CloudEx” a few months ago and sounds similar to EC2.