vs. Amazon | pages | us-vs-them

	Amazon EC2
Reliability	Amazon offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee, however SLA compensation requires user request and only amounts to 10% credit per month maximum. Aside from the guarantee, Amazon instances are "disposable", meaning that they are not guaranteed to be preserved in the event of hardware failure. Amazon EC2 and S3 services have experienced several severe failures just this year, and more last year.	Our cloud technology will typically restart a failed server's software on a new server within 5 minutes or 1 minute, depending on the service tier ordered, so that the state of your application is preserved. PrimaCloud offers a 10x monthly fee credit SLA guarantee for unplanned outages exceeding the offered SLA tiers of 99.95% (22 minutes per month) or 99.99% (30 seconds per month). PrimaCloud offers this rebate automatically because we monitor all hardware for downtime. All data stored in PrimaCloud's grid is RAIDed for redundancy: the chances of data loss are negligible. Additional backup services on request.
Security	NAT firewall only. Amazon instances are open to a variety of attacks. Protection requires installation of firewall and antivirus software on each instance, which soaks up significant CPU time.	Active Intrusion Detection/ Intrusion Prevention firewalls with antivirus available to protect against hacking, viruses and DOS attacks. PrimaCloud's Virtual Private Data Center paradigm means that your instances communicate with each other on secure private networks.
Pricing	Pricing starts at $0.10 per hour for the smallest instance (with Linux only). Additional "hidden" and difficult-to-estimate charges for storage accesses, both input and output bandwidth, IP addresses, and other consumables produce bills that can be surprisingly large and defy estimation based on published rates. Savings on reserved resources are contingent on buying them for a year in advance.	$0.19/GB-Hr (for equivalent service tier), with discounts for committed minimum usage levels over a term period or for prepayment. You don't have to pay in advance - ever! Automatic workload management can save you up to 80% over purchasing static resources by scaling your application automatically to match the load from users/customers - without having to manage your application or use complicated APIs. Savings are available on reserved resources paid for monthly instead of in advance.
Instance Configuration	Fixed ratio of RAM to CPU requires paying for resources you don't use.	User-defined ratio of RAM to CPU and charges only on total resource allocations allows balancing CPU and RAM across multiple instances resulting in overall cost savings.
Persistence	No guaranteed instance storage persistence: you must provide for application failover and redundancy since instance storage is lost on failure or shutdown. Essentially instance storage is only for scratchpad or temporary use since it can disappear at any time. External Elastic Block Store slows access to critical persistent data. Extra instances are required to provide failover capability, increasing cost.	Instances are guaranteed to be persistent. ENKI's Cloud management system closely models a highly reliable physical data center and handles server and application failover automatically.
Granularity	Instances have fixed resource allocation, which may result in extra costs. CPU power is measured in 1 GHz "cores"	ENKI instances can be adjusted to use any resource allocation from 1% to 100% of the physical server. CPU power is measured in core-equivalents of 2.8GHz.
IP addresses	Dynamic – you have to code around changing IP addresses. IP address remaps are charged. Fixed IP addresses at $7.20/mo	Static IP addresses beyond 5 cost $1/mo.
Controllability	Instances and storage are allocated by API call. Your application is responsible for scaling itself.	PrimaCloud sets up and adjusts your VPDC for you. We offer root logins to virtual servers in your VPDC, as well as management plans that eliminate the need to log in or know anything about how to manage the server. Your VPDC can scale automatically in response to changing load conditions.
Observability	You provide your own monitoring.	PrimaCloud offers enterprise-grade monitoring at the application and server levels, to let you know what's going on with your VPDC and application. We can notify you automatically if your server isn't working the way you want it to be. We can even remotely monitor the experience that your customers are having on your site!
Locality	You don't know exactly where your application is running: there is little to no control over deployed data center architecture. Large scale storage only available at WAN speeds.	PrimaCloud manages its own data centers and controls locality of data and compute functions. Large scale storage is available at LAN speeds.
Network	N/A	Multiple gigabit connections to multiple carriers ensure best-in-class network performance.
Bandwidth Pricing	You are charged for both input and output bandwidth.	PrimaCloud charges only the max of input and output bandwidth, resulting in significant savings for storage intensive applications.
Bandwidth Quality	No specification. Highly variable due to random distribution of Amazon's data centers.	PrimaCloud's data centers are located at carrier meet-me points with carefully selected carrier mix to ensure minimum ping and transit times.
Deployment	You figure out how to deploy, optimize, and manage your application. Many users hire additional staff to do this.	PrimaCloud's experienced staff of IT professionals deploys your application for you in a virtual data center of your design, with full management available.
Vendor Lock-In	Amazon's API and AMI images are unique to Amazon and require rewriting or re-architecting your application to move it to another provider.	PrimaCloud's high-speed network allows for quick migration to or from us. Our focus on providing solutions based on industry standard technology means that your VPDC can be moved to another cloud or colocation using similar technology very easily by simply copying the server images.
Included Support	Forums and user groups. Paid support plans available, but only for Amazon's technology, not your applications and deployment.	You call the phone and we answer, with guaranteed service response times. Optionally, Our system admin experts take responsibility for your VPDC, servers and software, including full outsourced operations management if you need it.
Intended Customer	Do-it-yourself IT professionals, short-term resource consumers, organizations that have more free personnel time than cash.	Organizations requiring enterprise-grade guaranteed service levels without staffing investment, wishing to take advantage of PrimaCloud's extensive data center design expertise.

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