Cloud Leverage Looks Skyward For App Acceleration

But the young company isn't kidding itself. It knows its purpose: "We will not be providing cloud computing," Cloud Leverage president and CTO Jonathan Hoppe said in a recent interview.

This week, Asheville, N.C.-based Cloud Leverage unveiled its Cloud Acceleration offerings which boost the performance and reliability of Web applications in the cloud. Cloud Acceleration differs from standard content delivery networks in that it doesn't rely on edge caching to improve app response time in the cloud. Instead, it boosts the performance of Web sites and applications, like ecommerce, SaaS, VoIP, CIFs, video conferencing and more.

Hoppe said Cloud Leverage also offloads the connection management from the Web servers to its platform to reduce server costs and cut down on server/client interaction. Meanwhile, with Cloud Acceleration, Cloud Leverage can scale edge server resources based on demand to deliver high-quality Web experiences to end users.

Hoppe added that Cloud Leverage can fix Web-specific problems inherent in the Web like packet loss, latency and jitter. It does this using its 32-node global network; direct peering; limited edge caching; traffic optimization through TCP acceleration, real-time packet order correction and adaptive forward error correction; and byte level de-duplication.

Cloud Leverage also offers an appliance that can be installed at the origin to optimize traffic close to the origin server to accelerate the first mile of the network.

Cloud Acceleration runs $150 per month, Hoppe said, plus 5 cents per GB for additional traffic.

Hoppe said he expects comparisons between Cloud Leverage's Cloud Acceleration and typical WAN optimization and acceleration. But he said the differences are plenty.

"What we're doing is cloudifying it and making it available to the entire internet," he said, adding Cloud Acceleration pulls traffic and makes it available to everyone instead of requiring an appliance in all locations to receive optimized traffic.

Cloud Acceleration is also a turnaround on Cloud Leverage's storage roots, which was the company's initial goal. Hoppe said Cloud Leverage will continue its cloud storage roots, through which it offers cloud storage for 5 cents per GB per data center, but helping increase the performance of applications in the cloud is a logical progression.

And while Cloud Leverage doesn't yet have an official partner program in place, it is investigating its channel options and offering brandable solutions. Hoppe said he foresees backup providers being best suited for Cloud Leverage's soon-to-be channel, partners that can leverage both storage and acceleration capabilities.