North America cloud

Better performance at lower prices – our U.S. cloud locations

We recently underwent a major infrastructure, connectivity and pricing upgrade to our cloud locations in mainland U.S. So we created this blog post to share the details about why we made that change, how you can take advantage of it and finally some of the really great things it means for our cloud going forward.

Improved performance

After introducing Intel as part of our standard offering some years ago, the time came for the next hardware upgrade. So, we have recently upgraded our whole compute infrastructure across all locations in mainland U.S. to HPE Generation 10 Intel® Xeon® Gold 6148 processors. To clarify, the default CPU core performance is 2.40GHz and each virtual core can achieve 3.1GHz with Intel Turbo Boost Technology.

Apart from improved performance, the new HPE Gen-10 servers offer better security and more persistent memory and manageability. The security feature, also known as “silicon root of trust”, is at the firmware level, aiming to repel firmware attacks and stop servers executing compromised firmware code.

All cloud servers in San Jose, Washington D.C. and Miami have already been upgraded to the newest Gen-10 HPE servers. So, we hope you notice the improved computing performance as a result.

Improved connectivity

We are always looking to improve performance for customers especially in light of the upcoming business continuity features (see here). We therefore decided to modify our connectivity strategy. Similarly, all three cloud locations are now connected to our new exchange provider Megaport, offering on-demand scalable connectivity to hundreds of cloud and network service providers.

Not only does this provide us with lower latency connectivity for customers, but you may now connect to our cloud over Megaport, seamlessly extending your networking into our cloud at a very low cost.

New data center

We also took the opportunity of the hardware upgrade to reconsider our data center provider strategy. As a result, we have decided to change the data center provider and as of today we are hosted in Cyxtera across our three U.S. mainland locations.

Price drop

Starting December 1st 2019, CloudSigma is decreasing prices for all North America cloud locations. To clarify, this price reduction is based on a combination of additional efficiency gains from the company’s proprietary cloud technology and falling underlying hardware costs.

Thus, we have now updated the prices as follows across all locations:

CPU & RAM: 10% reduction
SSD: 25% reduction

MS licenses price update

Since Microsoft has recently announced a price increase of 10% on all SPLA licenses, as of December 1st this price update will be reflected in our cloud licensing pricing as well. Moreover, the new prices in USD can be reviewed in the table below:

Software Licensing Utilisation New Price
Windows Server Standard core/month 11.10
Windows Server 2016 core/month 20.30
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise core/month 402.00
Microsoft SQL Server Standard core/month 104.90
Microsoft SQL Server Web core/month 6.60
Microsoft RDS connection/month 7.70

All new purchases of Microsoft licensing subscriptions after this point will reflect this revised pricing. In addition, any existing subscriptions are not affected.

Coming soon: new features

CloudSigma has recently launched a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering that will, firstly, allow companies to set up disaster recovery services with just a few clicks and minimal configuration time. Secondly, the service allows you to replicate data and systems from other infrastructures or locations. In addition, you can have these periodically synced to the cloud automatically. Last but not least, it can sync servers and desktops and both physical and virtual systems.

This seamless DRaaS system is fully integrated into the CloudSigma platform providing an ideal business continuity and disaster recovery solution at a very reasonable cost. It enables the IT department to easily switch production systems to a secure and stable cloud infrastructure during a disaster without having to replicate all compute hardware in a way that traditional DR solutions require.

Ultimately, by the end of 2018, we will introduce the service across all cloud locations in North America. Check our blog regularly because we will have special promotions and a webinar coming up soon.

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About Vanya Nikova

Vanya is leading the Global Customer Development Team at CloudSigma. Beside that, she is responsible for a number of big data and big science partners and projects at CloudSigma. She has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Mannheim, Germany with 10 years of work experience in sales and consulting services.