An Amazon cloud rival lets users spec out their own servers

Grazed from ARS Technica. Author: Jon Brodkin.

Amazon’s omnipresent cloud computing service has a new rival with an interesting take on how to provide virtual servers. Instead of offering several types of pre-defined instances—each with a certain amount of memory, storage, and CPU power—an infrastructure-as-a-service company called ProfitBricks lets customers spec out their own virtual machines.

A ProfitBricks virtual machine can have up to 48 CPU cores, up to 196GB in RAM, and storage of up to 256TB. Whereas Amazon offers a set number of instance types at fixed prices, ProfitBricks lets users build their virtual machines by plugging their desired RAM, cores, and storage into a handy calculator. The company touts fast connectivity, with up to 80Gbps network speed using InfiniBand and four 10Gbps Internet connections for each instance, and "as many network ports to servers, firewalls and load balancers as you need." Previously available in Europe, the ProfitBricks service became generally available in North America this week with a data center in Las Vegas. (Amazon has data centers on both US coasts.)…

While Amazon charges per hour, ProfitBricks bills by the minute, potentially making it desirable for applications with constantly fluctuating traffic requirements. Comparing prices, a standard large Amazon instance (which has 4 cores, 850GB storage, and 7.5GB memory) would cost $230.40 for 30 days running Linux or Unix, and $331.20 for 30 days running Windows. Plugging those same specs into the ProfitBricks price calculator results in a 30-day charge of $226.82 without Windows and $284.42 with Windows…

Read more from the source @ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/an-amazon-cloud-rival-lets-users-spec-out-their-own-servers/