How an Indian cloud services player beat Amazon and Rackspace on price-performance metrics

Securing a big milestone for a company originating from India, NxtGen, a firm operating in the high-end data center and cloud-based services business, has outperformed Amazon Web Services and Rackspace in the price-performance metric for cloud servers, according to an independent benchmarking report by Cloud Spectator, a US-based industry consultant in performance and pricing analysis for the IaaS marketplace.

Cloud Spectator tested virtual machines from Amazon, NxtGen, and Rackspace for a period of five days between March 17, 2015 and March 21, 2015, and found that NxtGen offers up to 4 times more value for customers compared to the global players.

For this study, Cloud Spectator evaluated performance by benchmarking the virtual machines (VM) using industry accepted tools: Geekbench 3, FIO and Iperf tests. The respective benchmarks measured vCPU & memory, storage, and internal network. The testing ensued over the course of a five day period in March, for ensuring sustained performance requirements by the enterprises and pricing was examined in conjunction with the performance tests.

Typically, cloud architectures at most service providers have evolved from architectures deployed for enterprise private clouds. Such architectures have multiple bottlenecks to scale the infrastructure to host thousands of customers with different requirements. NxtGen has designed an architecture that high in performance but flexible enough to incorporate stringent compliance requirements of the industry.

"Our approach does not differentiate customer workloads, we provide best-in-class performance for all customers and all types of applications. This simplifies our architecture eliminating multiple layers of management, and helps us in reducing our cost and delivering unparalleled raw performance. Additionally, our software only architecture allows us to rapidly scale and our SSD storage provides the same performance for every single workload," states A S Rajgopal, MD and CEO, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies.

Rajgopal states that his customers typically save between 40 – 80% on cost, compared to what they would spend with Amazon. NxtGen has also understood that handholding customers in their cloud journey is crucial, as many of them do not have the capability to tackle issues such as migration. "Most enterprises are engaging system integrators to deploy and manage workloads on cloud. We have a strong managed services offering, eliminating the need for additional layer of services. We are handling our customers while they take steps to move into the cloud, right from migration of existing applications from physical servers and managing the infrastructure 24/7, in-terms of availability, performance, security and compliance," states he.

Preserving legacy investments in hardware
Understanding the fact that many customers have been making investments over many years in physical infrastructure and would not like to do away with their infrastructure, NxtGen works with such companies to envelop their current infrastructure with virtual infrastructure for hosting new applications or taking over the work load from hardware that needs refresh. This strategy has helped it win a huge number of customers.

"We are the only service provider in the world, which provides cloud services both on-customer-premises or hosted from our data centers. In the long-run we work with our customers to leverage an infinite data center, between resources available on their premises or hosted in our data centers," says Rajgopal. This strategy has made a huge difference, as the firm has managed to win business from famed competitors such as Amazon.

Betting big on the future
In India, while the initial adoption was from enterprises who had inherent skill sets, today most enterprises are aware that they can leverage cloud services. Rajgopal believes that with a huge market of SMBs, the Indian cloud computing market has huge scope and potential to expand further. With digitization becoming one of the priorities for most smaller businesses as well, the cloud opportunity is undoubtedly huge and NxtGen is using a large partner base to address this opportunity, encouraging small enterprises to start using the cloud infrastructure, even for applications that are not cloud aware.

"We grew 863% last year and expect to grow in excess of 300% this year. Financial services is the biggest sector for us, our recent acquisition being IDFC bank for our on-premise cloud services. Digital businesses form our second largest set of customers – Reliance Entertainment being the biggest. We are also working through partners servicing 5 state governments and some central government initiatives. We are proud of the work we did for Dept of Science and Technology, Gujarat in the area of providing hi-performance compute platform for Genome Sequencing on our cloud," states Rajgopal.

The digital wave is throwing open unprecedented opportunities. For example, eCommerce sites who do flash sales of smartphones which last just a few minutes, use NxtGen's cloud infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis. Media companies which require tremendous bandwidth during events such as elections, also use the firm's cloud infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis.  In a country which is increasingly going digital, NxtGen clearly has a big opportunity to carve a bigger piece of the market with its unique strategy.