SoftLayer's real advantage seems to be in bandwidth. Offering bandwidth at $0.10/GB or cheaper in bundles, their CloudLayer Storage can offer some nice savings

SoftLayer's real advantage seems to be in bandwidth. Offering bandwidth at $0.10/GB or cheaper in bundles, their CloudLayer Storage can offer some nice savings over S3 depending on what you need. Likewise, while they haven't published their CloudLayer Computing prices yet, the plans do include 2,000GB of outbound bandwidth and free incoming bandwidth which is potentially a huge cost savings over EC2 since 2,000GB of bandwidth would cost $360 on EC2. SoftLayer tends to have a wonderful reputation with many YC companies choosing it for their hosting. I'm not sure I'd want to be one of the first customers on this new service, but I'm definitely glad it's happening. If nothing else, hopefully it will put pressure on Rackspace and Amazon.