>>Hi,
>>Thanks for sharing your headaches, much appreciated. Have you had a look at IBM Smart Cloud?
>>
>
>I have not looked at IBM Smart Cloud. I did look at GoGrid, RackSpace, and Microsoft's Solution.
>
>GoGrid - scary reviews regarding customer service. Product is still a bit immature but they have some compelling features... namely the ability to have a dedicated backbone between data centers - useful for mirrored database setups.
>
>RackSpace - great customer service reviews, product is not up to par with AWS. They won't allow you to choose the data center and futhermore, don't even tell you what datacenter you are in. All servers after the first one get fired up in the same datacenter so you don't have geographical redundancy.
>
>Microsoft - no virtual servers... only virtual services and SQL Azure had a 24 hour outage not that long ago. No thanks.

Azure supports VM images if that's what you want...
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/virtual-machines/

>
>To be honest AWS was lightyears ahead of everything else. The bad thing with AWS is that all hard drive access is via SAN's. You can get at the local disk (called ephemeral storage) but it's a giant PIA and it's not persistent.
>
>In my dream world I could plop real database servers into AWS and utilize everything else.