Swiss cloud service supplier CloudSigma, in partnership with CompatibleOne, lets customers provision and track multiple cloud workloads through a single interface.

CloudSigma, a eu cloud supplier with its foot in North America’s door, has teamed up with open source code company CompatibleOne SAS for a shot at becoming a player alongside Amazon. CompatibleOne’s system allows cloud users to access multiple cloud through a single interface.

Through the CompatibleOne interface, a CloudSigma user could deploy workloads to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, HP Cloud, Joyent, GoGrid, OnApp, and Dimension Data. CompatibleOne users provision workloads on OpenStack clouds and VMware’s Hybrid vCloud Service. It also allows access to 2 PaaS providers: VMware/Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s Open Shift.

That means an existing CloudSigma user could easily become an Amazon user — or vice versa — without changing provisioning platforms. CompatibleOne is produced by the French open source project CompatibleOne.org and is backed by the British-French company CompatibleOne SAS.

“We started speaking to CompatibleOne six months ago,” said Viktor Petersson, platform evangelist at CloudSigma. He said CloudSigma staff have been since then in a dialogue with Jean-Pierre Laisne, project lead of CompatibleOne.org and now CEO of CompatibleOne SAS, its commercial technical support company. The partnership ensures that CloudSigma operations and CompatibleOne will interact smoothly sooner or later.

[Desire to learn more about how CloudSigma differentiates itself? Read CloudSigma IaaS Avoids Amazon Approach.]

When challenged to explain what users couldn’t do using CompatibleOne that they might do with the Amazon or Rackspace customer portals, Petersson drew a blank. But he conceded that CompatibleOne seriously isn’t an entire substitute for the native cloud interfaces. Rather, he said, it’s a technique of launching workloads and keeping tabs on where workloads were running in the event that they are spread across several public clouds.

“i don’t believe there’s 100% coverage of all of the functions [of every public cloud]. There can be scenarios where you need to go in and use the native interfaces,” he said.

CloudSigma was launched by a consortium of IT service providers in March 2012, and CERN and two other European research centers signed up as early customers. CloudSigma operates its primary data center in Zurich, Switzerland. It opened a datacenter in Equinix’s Ashburn, Va., facility in late October. Its first North American site was on the SwitchNAP wholesale datacenter space in Las Vegas. “We’ll be adding a number of more locations shortly,” said Petersson in an interview. “We’re finding progressively more traction within the US.”

The cause of that, partly, is the fear by European multi-national corporations over potential NSA spying. Petersson explained that a CloudSigma customer with operations in both Zurich and Washington would have to log into each facility using an extra interface. With CompatibleOne that will now not be necessary.

Some cloud customers will need to keep a powerful US presence to remain on the subject of customers, he continued, while storing their data in Switzerland. Even Germany, which has strict rules on keeping data originating within its borders in German datacenters, allows its international companies to store data in Switzerland. “Germany is pretty friendly about storing data in Switzerland,” he said. “There is a lot of trust there.”

CloudSigma is making an attempt to entice customers by offering more flexible options than Amazon does. As well as its multi-cloud interface, the corporate touts a versatile configuration option that lets customers assemble the virtual servers they wish. When put next, instance sizes, reminiscent of the M1 and M3 medium virtual servers offered by Amazon, and people of Microsoft and Rackspace, include pre-set combinations of storage, CPU, and RAM. Currently just two other cloud suppliers also provide flexible server configuration: ProfitBricks and CenturyLink.

CloudSigma was also an early implementer of SSDs related to cloud server hosts. “Our storage is all SSDs now,” Petersson noted. “We don’t have any magnetics [disk drives] in any respect.” In doing this, the corporate has eliminated much of the “noisy neighbor” problem of contention for resources on a cloud host server.

CloudSigma now has about 1,000 customers, starting from single developers and small businesses to important research labs and international businesses.

In step with Petersson, CloudSigma’s virtual resource pricing is competitive with Amazon and other cloud service providers. He cited two price cuts last year, in July and October. Neither announcement mentions specific existing prices. According to the October announcement, both reductions amounted to a 28% reduction in CPU pricing and a 36% reduction in RAM pricing in a six-month period.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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