ReadWriteEnterprise

Amazon has added two new EC2 reserved instances, so that users now have the choice of four pricing models for EC2 instances. Seven, if you count choosing between one-year and three-year terms.

A quick refresher might be in order. Amazon started with a single price for its EC2 instances, then added reserved instances in 2009. The reserved instances give you a break on instance pricing in exchange for an up-front fee per-instance.

It's been a crazy conference week with VMworld and Dreamforce '11 going on at the same time. News from those shows have been all over ReadWriteWeb's channels this week, like the VMware vFabric Data Director announcement, and CloudStack going 100% open source.

We also looked at storing Salesforce data locally, and Microsoft's digs at a certain virtualization vendor over cloud computing.

An article by Derek Singleton on the blog for Software Advice talks about five things that he sees makes SaaS unique, including the talent draw of cloud companies, the ability to scale up operations more smoothly, the way cloud software is being purchased and consumed and other reasons.

While Singleton makes a lot of sense - and I do like the folks on Software Advice and think they are generally smart guys - he is missing a few major drawbacks with SaaS that are holding things back for better enterprise adoption.

What do you do when you have more than 2.5 million users daily and have to deliver five nines uptime? If you're Medio Systems, you roll your own cloud using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Hadoop, and IBM System x servers.