DreamHost Unveils IaaS Cloud to Compete with Amazon

Hosting provider DreamHost has spent much of 2012 preparing for its entry into the cloud computing market. In April the company said it was working with Nicira to optimize a speedy network for its OpenStack-based cloud. In June, DreamHost said it was expending its infrastructure beyond its core Los Angeles market by opening an East Coast data center at a new Raging Wire facility in Ashburn, Virginia. In September it rolled out a cloud storage platform based on the open source Ceph file system.

Today DreamHost unveiled DreamCompute, its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud compute service, which it is positioning as an alternative to the market-leading IaaS cloud from Amazon Web Services. The service is launching as a public beta, with pricing to be announced in coming weeks. In coverage at The WHIR, Liam Eagle provides an overview of the announcement, including commentary from DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson:

In an interview appearing in the upcoming issue of WHIR magazine, Anderson expressed his excitement about DreamHost’s cloud hosting offerings as an example of how companies in the traditional web hosting business can use their specific expertise to compete against Amazon in the cloud infrastructure market.

“I’m excited to see that the web hosting industry in particular start to break the boundaries of hosting, which have been reasonably static for quite a long time,” he says. “I think what I’d like everyone to see is, look, at its core, we are very good as an industry at highly efficient and scalable infrastructure. And we shouldn’t forget that. Just because Amazon has come along and built a substantial multibillion-dollar business around delivering that infrastructure doesn’t mean that we can’t be out there competing with them.

DreamHost used Opscode Private Chef to automate configuration and environment management for its new DreamCompute public cloud and DreamObjects cloud storage service, as noted in a announcement from Opscode.

“By using Opscode Private Chef to automate its Ceph and OpenStack-powered services, DreamHost is enabling businesses to store and process limitless amounts of data and run web-scale applications on the Internet with the security of traditional data center infrastructure,” said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer for Opscode.