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Equinix is acquiring Packet

packet.com

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#42
post #5

Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into a closed-off enterprise-only product/service, especially in the IXP space.

I didn't know how fast to turn around when I tried to register an account and they insisted I needed to provide a copy of my passport or drivers license. I don't know why I need to provide such information for a hosting provider as I've never had to do so before at any of their competitors. or perhaps you mean something else with open?

> I didn't know how fast to turn around when I tried to register an account and they insisted I needed to provide a copy of my passport or drivers license.

Hosting / pay for remote virtual stuff is notorious for abuse. I'm surprised AWS doesn't require an ID to get started these days. I understand why smaller player do, though.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends of course peoples needs for cloud. Some people need the power of bare metal and that's why most cloud providers are moving to making that an option.

Probably mostly for marketing purposes (just to say they have it). Kvm/nitro penalty is within single percentage points these days so 99% of folks out there won’t even know the difference.

But generally that 1 percent probably spends a heck of alot of money and pay the people to recognize the difference I'm sure.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#45
post #6
post #3

A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs. I guess my account got pwned. They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a valid card in their system (the previous…

Packet is not doing virtualization.

Exactly the story he has sounds fabricated. Maybe he is mixing providers up.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumption based on 1) their pricing model and 2) them being acquired by Equinix (who I consider quite conservative).

I believe their pricing model was cheaper than any of the major cloud providers for an equivalent compute and networking resources. Given that their margins are also lower due to the volumes, I wouldn't think that it's obvious that they were profitable just by their pricing model.

Their control plane is more simple

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#48

Packet's blog post: https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/ This is probably a good play for Equinix as it provides a lower barrier to entry to a segment of the market that they typically haven't engaged (Packet being largely profitable probably helps). In addition, I believe Packet already had presence in a number of Equinix datacenters so "landlord buys tenant" comes to mind...

That's more readable, so we've changed the URL above to it from https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/123868/Eq.... Thanks!

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the way I see it: there are a lot of customers who don't need all of the AWS services. They also would prefer to be running on bare metal for performance reasons, and to have slightly more control over their application. I know AWS with the nitro instances are closing that gap, but packet was around before they had those. Also, their provisioning software is excellent. From the time you choose to deploy, it ta…

ok awesome. minor follow up - why do customers care about the newer instances like cavium arm processors? again is it a pure performance thing? or they are extremely optimized for some kind of workload? maybe i'm so used to OSes abstracting things that I completely lack knowledge about what baremetal choices can do for me. this is a little scary.

I can't speak for everyone, but ARM processors may be cheaper for some types of workloads. In terms of cores/$, they're cheaper, but some applications would perform far worse on those than on x86. Others just want to use them as a playground to test ideas without buying an ARM server.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#50
post #14
post #3

A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs. I guess my account got pwned. They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a valid card in their system (the previous…

My company moved to packet about two years ago, for about half of our cloud-based server needs. We loved the pricing and figured it was worth a shot. Over the last 2 years, we've had ~4 major outages on their platform. The last of these was so severe we're moving everything back off and over to aws.

4 outages in 2 years isn't horrible.... AWS would have the same story, as would basically any other hosting provider.
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