New Products, We’re going virtual!
Well it’s been an exciting past few weeks (besides the Christmas and new years drunken activities) at Ausweb, We’re starting to move into some uncharted territory. We have primarily been a website hosting company, and we also provide dedicated server solutions for customers, Which we do (I think) very well. But now, as the industry changes, we must adapt.
If you keep tabs on the IT industry, you most probably have noticed the hype of late which has been hosting in a virtual environment. This basically gives you the advantage of having the features of a dedicated server, But not having your own physical hardware. It’s done by assigning things like disk space, memory and CPU allocation to customers and keeping them completely seperate from each other in “containers”, Virtual Private Servers are what you could call the new black in the hosting world.
I personally love the idea, There’s a huge amount flexibility that comes with virtualizing your servers, including moving your server from one physical hardware node to the other, backing up the entire server over the network and, allowing you to restore it (in the case of a major failure) in minutes. It’s absolutely amazing the way things are going with visualization and we’re trying to provide the most of it here at Ausweb. We’ve recently launched our VirtuozzoVPS Hosting solutions and that is running very smoothly. We’re currently in the process of implementing a Windows solution also, This should be available as soon as we sort out licensing.
But something I’m personally excited about is the idea of Clustered VPS Hosting. Normally having a cluster of servers is extremely expensive and requires a lot of effort to set up and configure, But the idea of moving a cluster into a virtual hosting environment completely removes some of the major restrictions in clustering. Servers can be rebooted or even restored from a backup very quickly, not pushing load onto other servers in the cluster for lengthy periods of time. It also saves a massive amount of space that is normally taken up when having a full rack of physical servers. Visualization allows you to move your entire rack into one server.
With Virtuozzo the servers host operating system is the only instance running, And the containers each have symlinks for the file system and use their own allocated resources. There’s no need to completely install an operating system within each containers (up to 2-3GB of disk space required), Instead you have your basic directory structure plus any files or unique data to your operating system there, Which can sometimes be as little as 100mb. Having a backup file that is only a 100mb uncompressed is an absolute wonder in the case of a crash. It can be copied over the network, back to your container and restored in less than a minute.
Imagine one of your servers having catastrophic failure and requiring you to go into the data center blind, and not knowing what the issue was. There is a chance that you need to run around and find a replacement server or hardware to fix this issue, And If its a mission critical server, you’re going to have some downtime if there is no redundancy. This is why Virtual Private Servers are so flexible.
I’m looking forward to releasing our clustered solutions next month and getting our first virtual clustered client signed up, As i’m very confident the service will amaze everyone.