ElasticStack's sliders enable users to fluidly scale their services
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — For web hosts looking to build public or private clouds, the cost of hardware and flexible scalability are both factors worth considering. ElasticStack (www.elasticstack.com) released version 2 of its cloud software platform on Thursday, addressing both of these features, which the company says makes it a good solution for web hosting providers looking to compete with Amazon EC2 or Rackspace cloud servers.
ElasticHosts (www.elastichosts.com) launched ElasticStack in June 2010 after fielding numerous requests from people interested in building clouds in their own data centers, with their own brands, using the ElasticHosts technology.
Richard Davies, the company’s chief executive officer, says ElasticStack is a fully integrated set of software that runs on standard machines, can be scaled up and down on-demand, and is billable to end-customers by the hour.
“There are now five other public clouds around the world, besides ElasticHosts that are running on ElasticStack technology,” Davies says. “There’s one in Malaysia called Skali Cloud (www.skalicloud.com), one in South Africa, two in Europe and one in North America, in addition to ElasticHosts itself.”
Davies says a lot of the changes to ElasticStack v2 are incremental, including bug fixes, small feature improvements and more integration with different systems. He points to the user interface, Ajax, and the storage improvement as the biggest changes to ElasticStack v2.
“What we’ve done with ElasticStack v2 is we’ve said, ‘hang on, why are we asking people to buy two sets of hardware when actually the machines they’re going to buy build the virtualization on have perfectly good disk space in them?’” Davies says.
He says this improvement will lower hardware costs, and because of this, web hosts will get a “very good return on investment.”
“You’d buy a set of hardware that ran the virtualization for the virtual servers the end-customer is going to buy and you’d run another set of hardware which runs storage,” Davies says. “So you’d have either a SAN, essentially all the disks would be stored onto, or you might have more like a build-it-yourself SAN, but again you’d have some sort of storage cluster separate from the computer cluster where the virtualization is actually going to happen.”
Davies says ElasticStacks is a prepackaged, integrated solution that is quickly deployable and has a lower hardware cost than vCloud, for example.
“The fact that we can build it quickly using very cheap hardware for a provider is very helpful for cloud providers to get products out of the door and to make sure they’re going to make money on them,” Davies says.
The control panel includes versatile scalability, with sliders that let users simply slide to scale.
“For instance, people running in the Amazon cloud have a set of fixed sizes that they can scale between and there are about 15 or 20 Amazon sizes,” Davies says. “Whereas on the ElasticStack cloud customers use a set of sliders so they can just configure each of them to whatever size they want it.”
“There are quite a lot of web hosting providers and data center providers who don’t have a good, on-demand, truly scalable platform and product that they’re selling to their customers,” Davies says. “With ElasticStack we can help you quickly build a cloud product that you can sell to your customers who have probably asked you for one.”
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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