Fengqi Asia: From China With Love
The cloud revolution has caught Asia – finally. Once confined to Silicon Valley startups, now cloud technology is getting increasingly adopted by startups around the world. The low OpEx and increased scope for development agility are tempting the new wave of startups to rely heavily on cloud infrastructure. However, given the legal and performance challenges involved, some of the international startups are now scouting local cloud vendors.
Fengqi, based out of Hong Kong and Shanghai, is one such new vendor that is filling the need. Besides serving local startups, one of the prime markets they target is Web companies who are looking to release their applications in China. Given the low latency offered by a local datacenter, it is possible to deliver a high-quality experience to their Chinese users.
The company relies mainly on Joyent technology for providing its customers both public cloud and enterprise private cloud options. The enterprise private cloud option with fully built and installed option is offered in many Chinese cities, though it is not yet clear which cities will eventually be supported.
Although the venture is new, Fengqi’s parent company Clustertech is well known in cloud computing and has been providing services to companies such as HSBC, ING and Chinese oil major Sinopec for more than 12 years. Last year, Clustertech inked an agreement with Joyent that resulted in this venture.
Services offered by Fengqi
- Mobile app hosting – emerging economies have adopted the mobile revolution faster than many of Western economies. China has the largest mobile market, and Fengqi provides Node.js-based cloud hosting for mobile apps.
- Game hosting – gaming is very hot in Asia, and Chinese games are following the lead of the Japanese and Koreans. Massive multiplay role-playing games are very common there, and given the expansion of super-speed bandwidth, there is now a huge market for game hosting.
- Web hosting
- Enterprise private cloud hosting
Performance
The benchmark numbers released by the company are quite impressive compared to Amazon EC2 and other local competitors. They claim that their proprietary virtual machines (SmartMachines) allow ten times more users than a comparable Amazon EC2 server. Also, they claim to provide automatic 400% CPU bursting to handle peak loads. Nevertheless, I would prefer to see third-party confirmation of these tests, which would give more credibility to these figures.
Tell us if you have used their servers. What was your experience with their service and performance?
By Balaji Viswanathan
