What do you think of Faction?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Carefully worded.... there is no guarantee of uptime or performance, only a guarantee of "100% SLA". That is, quite literally, gibberish. It has no meaning whatsoever.
This is so funny. I frequently read contracts with garbage like this for new clients to help get them on track. Just yesterday I had a client send me their Rackspace contract. They're paying 550/mo for what they thought was a dedicated server, but what they got was "Dedicated Account Management and Business Development Team". So basically they've been paying 550/mo for a VPS running Windows Server 2008 to host Quickbooks for two people. sigh.
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@drewlander marketing preys on that a lot. For some reason, many people (IT seems specifically subject to this) will read in a "good intent" into every bit of marketing, sales, contracts, etc. Even if the contract suggests nothing of the sort people feel like "they would definitely want to do X or Y" and so imagine that the contract says that. In this case they imagine that "uptime" is sensible and desirous so they just assume it is being guaranteed.
It is an incredibly unhealthy reaction. It's like the "fool yourself on the other person's behalf" behaviour. The vendor is not the con man here, they've suggested nothing like uptime at all. They've not hinted at it, implied it... nothing. People reading it want uptime, don't want to ask and just "fill in the blank" with whatever they want and then act shocked when it is pointed out that nothing of the sort was said.
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I am disappointed that they are not more red.
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Hi All.
Wow! Lots of dialog here, I'll do my best to address. First, I need you guys to keep in mind that I am in fact a sales guy. More specifically, I've always worked specifically with the channel and that continues today. I'll also call out that as a sales person, I am not a marketing person. From my perspective...the goal of the website, and marketing in general, is to deliver to the sales organization people that are looking to buy a product or service that we can deliver. Clearly to do that we also need to articulate people clearly what we do and how we can help folks. A lot of the things on the website are are 100% objective and we all have our own opinions. What I will say about the website is that it is not optimized to deliver leads to the sales group. We may see you coming to the website, and we may see you come back...but we don't really know who you are and we don't have many ways for you to raise your hand ask us to engage with you. In time I hope this changes.
So now you guys know that I'm in sales and more specially hand in hand with the channel. With that said, our ideal customer profile is not an end user but rather a managed service or SaaS provider. Faction delivers enterprise class Infrastructure as a service purpose built for service providers , we have cloud nodes world wide. We compete with AWS, Rackspace, etc. This is not an SMB play but rather mid-market & enterprise. The 100% uptime guarantee means is that if you go down...we put our money where our mouth is. We aren't perfect, and we don't guarantee perfection. What we do guarantee is that if we have an issue and a customer's environment is not available - we don't expect you to pay for that. I think that level of accountability is refreshing.
Essentially what we deliver to the customer is an on premise data center in cloud. More times than not, this includes a dedicated vCenter with API access giving the customer ability to deploy your own tools such as Veeam, Unitrends, Unidesk, Zerto, etc. Pretty significant differentiators depending on who we are talking about. Each Faction cloud instance begins with the following:
25GB RAM
5 Ghz CPU
1 TB of storage
1000 IOPs
10 Mbps of internetFrom this point, resources can be added with granularity as needed to meet the needs of the customer.
I hope this helps. I've shared this post with my engineer as well and he will be sending over some bullet points on your technical concerns. I'll get that inserted as soon as possible. Appreciate everyone taking a few moments from your day to look at the site and give feedback.Cheers,
Linc -
Thanks for the additional info. Looking forward to learning more about the service.
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@scottalanmiller we really can't ignore the growth of UCS. Its very impressive in short time, if only from a sales perspective. The UCS portion of our business is very small. I see it more as a channel play allowing guys like me to have a better story when engaging a large Cisco reseller.
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@scottalanmiller if you really want to geek out on Layer 2 take a look at this: http://www.google.com/patents/US20130188512?dq=20130188512A1+-+Multi-tenant+Datacenter+with+Layer+2+Cloud+Interconnection&hl=en&sa=X&ei=reUbUsOmKarqiwK10oHgBg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA
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In practical terms, how is L2 site to site connectivity achieved? Are you installing a gateway VM or a hardware device at the client site, for example?
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@Lincoln said:
Essentially what we deliver to the customer is an on premise data center in cloud.
You lost me there. Isn't "on-premise" the opposite of "cloud"? Please explain?
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@art_of_shred said:
You lost me there. Isn't "on-premise" the opposite of "cloud"? Please explain?
Cloud does not imply public or private, hosted or on premises. Cloud is simply a computing architecture that can be closed, shared, local or remote or hyrbids of any of those approaches.
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Lots of companies are running cloud internally today. I've even heard that most cloud deployments are on site. VMware vCloud and OpenStack seem to be the most common.
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@art_of_shred - It looks and feels to like an on premise data center because the customer gets a dedicated private vCenter host and can bring all their existing virtualization tools that require host level API access. I haven't seen that from many cloud providers.
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@Lincoln said:
@art_of_shred - It looks and feels to like an on premise data center because the customer gets a dedicated private vCenter host and can bring all their existing virtualization tools that require host level API access. I haven't seen that from many cloud providers.
I am unclear as to which part there is unique. Having full access to vCenter and tools for VMware is common. Not something we want as we do not use VMware, just not up to par anymore, but having that was not normally a limitation on private cloud hosting in the past.
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I thought we had a big, scarlet letter to brand sales and marketing accounts here.... I know I've seen "service provider: ones, but I could have sworn I saw a "vendor" one somewhere...
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@scottalanmiller - I'm looking at my competitive matrix right now. It has 8 other cloud providers. Keep in mind we are talking VMWare only here. Only SingleHop really delivers this along with Rackspace. What most cloud providers do not provide is a dedicated vCenter with API access. If I'm being a homer, please say so because I'm not the type of person that just wants to drink the kool aid.
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@RojoLoco - I'm good with that for sure.
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@Lincoln said:
@scottalanmiller - I'm looking at my competitive matrix right now. It has 8 other cloud providers. Keep in mind we are talking VMWare only here. Only SingleHop really delivers this along with Rackspace. What most cloud providers do not provide is a dedicated vCenter with API access. If I'm being a homer, please say so because I'm not the type of person that just wants to drink the kool aid.
Most do not offer this because of the enterprise top tier hosts, Rackspace is the only one offering VMware. And they offer this service. So "to the market" it is a standard feature we would expect from anyone considered a viable vendor. I've never once seen a serious vendor that offered VMware as a private cloud product and did not offer access to the cloud platform to manage it.
Now most do not offer VMware, so offering that alone is a differentiating feature. But more importantly you offer other platforms.
Two things we need to consider carefully are:
- Who are the enterprise players.
- What do they offer.
You have eight cloud providers in your matrix, who are these players? The big ones are Amazon, Azure, Rackspace and Softlayer. Normally these are the only ones really considered to be competitive with each other.
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@RojoLoco said:
I thought we had a big, scarlet letter to brand sales and marketing accounts here.... I know I've seen "service provider: ones, but I could have sworn I saw a "vendor" one somewhere...
Vendors have to go into their accounts and under "Groups" Choose to be identified as a vendor.
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@scottalanmiller done.
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