While we are accustomed to competing with Amazon, we also understand that the two systems (ours and theirs) are quite different and comparison isn’t straightforward. Ultimately, we are focused on providing overall value to our customers that ensures their business success rather than exactly matching a particular resource rate which may not offer them long term value. Our offering is designed for customers who want the application transparency and reliability that AppLogic offers, while receiving that service in the context of a fully-managed enterprise class IT operations solution. We don’t think there’s anyone else in the cloud computing world that offers this combination, especially at resource prices that are below any other AppLogic based solution. Our Computing Utility solution is clearly not for everyone, and we’re not attempting to be the low price lead, but rather a guaranteed-to-work solution for business critical applications. Perhaps most importantly of all, in ENKI you have a personal connection with a partner interested in your success, and flexible enough to find ways to help you when you need help.

If price is a concern to you, don't miss ENKI's virtual private servers, which are offered at a 40% discount over our Computing Utility, while still offering the advantages of AppLogic's reliability and guaranteed performance as well as being upgradable to a full virtual private data center.

We understand that comparing ENKI prices to Amazon is difficult.  Amazon's per-instance rates may be lower, but due to complex charges for  bandwidth, storage, I/O operations, IP addresses and other resources, many of our customers have saved up to 10% over deploying with Amazon.  Case studies are available on request.

What's the difference between an ENKI "core" and an Amazon EC2 "core"?

ENKI's cores are the equivalent of a 2.8GHz Opteron or Xeon; Amazon has listed theirs as a 1GHz Opteron or Xeon.

Can you compare ENKI's Computing Utility and Amazon EC2 in detail?

	Amazon	ENKI Computing Utility
Reliability	SLA compensation for 99.95% uptime requires user request and only amounts to 10% credit per month. Amazon EC2 and S3 have experienced several severe failures just this year, and more last year.	10x money-back guarantee for unplanned outages exceeding AppLogic's 15-minute max restart time, which comes to approximately 3.5 nines of reliability.
Security	Amazon instances are open to a variety of attacks.  Protection requires installation of firewall and antivirus software on each instance, which soaks up significant CPU time.	Active Intrusion Detection/ Intrusion Prevention firewalls with antivirus available to protect against hacking, viruses and DOS attacks.  ENKI's Virtual Private Data Center paradigm means that your instances communicate with each other on secure private networks.
Pricing	Pricing starts at $0.10 per hour for the smallest instance (with Linux only). Additional "hidden" and difficult-to-estimate charges for storage accesses, both input and output bandwidth, IP addresses, and other consumables produce bills that can be surprisingly large and defy estimation based on published rates. Savings on reserved resources are contingent on buying them for a year in advance.	$0.19/GB-Hr, with discounts for committed minimum usage levels over a term period or for prepayment. You don't have to pay in advance - ever! Automatic workload management can save you up to 80% over purchasing static resources by scaling your application automatically to match the load from users/customers - without having to manage your application or use complicated APIs. Savings are available on reserved resources paid for monthly instead of in advance.
Instance configuration	Fixed ratio of RAM to CPU with limited  instance configuration choices requires paying for resources you don't use.	User-defined ratio of RAM to CPU and charges only on total resource allocations allows balancing CPU and RAM across multiple instances resulting in overall cost savings.
Persistence	No guaranteed instance storage persistence: you must provide for application failover and redundancy since instance storage is lost on failure or shutdown.  Essentially instance storage is only for scratchpad or temporary use since it can disappear at any time.  External Elastic Block Store slows access to critical persistent data. Extra instances are required to provide failover capability, increasing cost.	Instances are guaranteed to be persistent.  AppLogic closely models a highly reliable physical data center.  AppLogic handles server and application failover automatically.
Granularity/Scalability	You must purchase resources in increments of one of Amazon's limited set of instance sizes, which may result in increased costs.	ENKI instances can be adjusted to any resource allocation from 1% to 100% of the physical server.
Compute Power	Amazon measures resources in terms of approximately 1 GHz "cores."	ENKI measures resources in terms of cores equivalent to a 2.8GHz processor.
IP addresses	Dynamic - you have to code around changing IP addresses.  IP address remaps are charged.  Fixed IP addresses at $7.20/mo	Static.  IP addresses beyond 5 cost $1/mo.
Controllability	Instances and storage are allocated by API call. Your application is responsible for scaling itself.	ENKI adjusts your VPDC for you. We offer root logins to virtual servers in your VPDC, as well as management plans that eliminate the need to log in or know anything about how to manage the server. Your VPDC can scale automatically in response to changing load conditions.
Observability	You provide your own monitoring.	ENKI offers enterprise-grade monitoring at the application and server levels, as well as remote user-experience monitoring so that you always know what your users are experiencing on your site.
Locality/Predictability	You don't know where your application is running: there is little control over deployed data center architecture.  Large scale storage only available at WAN speeds.  Latency between instances and to S3 can vary from 10s to 100s of milliseconds, with large jitter.  Local resource zones only reduce latency and jitter, don't eliminate it.	ENKI manages its own data centers and controls locality of data and compute functions.  Large scale storage is available at direct-connect speeds, and all instances of your VPDC are on a local network with microsecond latencies, perfect for transaction oriented or telecommunications applications.  (Not applicable for geographically distributed applications.)
Bandwidth Pricing	You are charged for both input and output bandwidth	ENKI charges only the max of input and output bandwidth, resulting in significant savings for storage-intensive applications.
Bandwidth Quality	No specification.  Highly variable due to random distribution of Amazon's data centers	ENKI's data centers are located at carrier meet-me points such as MAE West, with carefully selected carrier mix to ensure minimum ping and transit times.
Deployment	You figure out how to deploy, architect,  and manage your application.  You have to understand Amazon's architecture to deploy and manage your application.  Many users hire additional stall to do this.	ENKI's experienced staff of IT professionals deploys  your application in a virtual data center of your design, with full management available.
Vendor Lock-In	Amazon	Running applications including an entire VPDC can be moved to another AppLogic-based partner's data center with a single command.
Support	Forums and user groups.  Paid support plans available, but only for Amazon's technology, not your applications and deployment.	You call the phone and we answer, with guaranteed service response times.  Optionally, our system admin experts take responsibility for keeping your application up and running.
Intended Audience	Do-it-yourself IT professionals, short-term resource consumers, organizations that have more free personnel time than cash.	Organizations requiring enterprise-grade guaranteed service levels without staffing investment, wishing to take advantage of ENKI's extensive data center design expertise.