(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As tends to come up in most discussions of the cloud computing space, there are many and various definitions of precisely what constitutes cloud computing, and scant consensus among the companies advertising cloud services.
One of the only aspects of the cloud that seems to have reached near-consensus recognition among marketing and media folks as a key component is the use of virtualization technology.
In a departure, then, from one of the most widely held principles of cloud computing, hosting provider NewServers (www.newservers.com) is working to demonstrate the power of a cloud computing product that delivers dedicated servers instead of shared resources, with its Bare Metal Cloud.
“Right now, the whole concept of server cloud is married to virtualization,” says NewServers CEO JP Gagne. “And we have a server cloud without the virtualization that works exactly the same way as the virtual server clouds. We’re selling dedicated servers, with automated provisioning, hourly billing, an API and an imaging system, which gives you all the advantages of a server cloud, simply without the virtualization.”
NewServers has been offering the Bare Metal Cloud solution for over two years, says Gagne (speaking to the WHIR in late 2009). He and partner Scott Mueller developed the product after first encountering Amazon EC2 in 2006, and being “blown away” by how the automation changed the way they looked at server resources – Gagne and Mueller both having spent years managing applications and servers. The only thing they didn’t like was the virtualization.
The philosophical reasoning for designing the service the way NewServers did, says Gagne, are what he considers to be the distinct disadvantages that virtualization imposes on hosted cloud-based offerings.
“I’m not opposed to virtualization as much as I am opposed to sharing,” he says. “So if you’ve got a corporate data center and you’re all one user, or users from one company in the data center, there are advantages there. But in virtual server clouds, all of the advantages of virtualization go to the service provider – since they control the hypervisor – and not to the end user.”
NewServers sells access to dedicated machines on an hourly billing model, so customers can actually turn up, use, and turn off a dedicated server for just an hour. The service is available in five configurations ranging from $0.11 to $0.53 per hour.
This requires the company to maintain a cushion of racked and powered servers, of course. But, according to Gagne, the capacity planning process – and the excess capacity required – is roughly the same as that of a cloud based on virtualization, with the exception that NewServers doesn’t have the ability to oversubscribe that a VPS host would have.
NewServers has a menu of server configuration images that are applied to the machines when they are brought online, either via the company’s web app, or via its API, and customers can create custom server images of their own.
A more exhaustive description of the features and functions of the Bare Metal Cloud service is available in the documentation section of the company’s website.
Philosophically, says Gagne, NewServers’ approach to the cloud is built around the billing, the provisioning and the API; a pool of resources you can take from, put back when you’re done and pay for what you used. In this case, that pool is made up of dedicated servers.
Many of the advantages of the NewServers model, says Gagne, are described by what he considers the disadvantages of virtualization – namely latency caused by applications with high network or disk i/o demands, making especially latency averse applications like VoIP or online gaming more difficult to run. He also cites added complexity that can increase the risk of crashes and the security concerns attached to sharing hardware.
One of the distinct advantages of NewServers’ model, Gagne feels, is that – unlike the black-box approaches necessarily taken by large-scale virtualized clouds like Amazon’s – the company is able to describe specifically the hardware it is offering to customers.
While hardware specifics being an abstraction is, in the opinions of many cloud providers, key to the understanding of the cloud, Gagne says it is precisely this access to specific hardware that makes NewServers’ Bare Metal Cloud the solution that many of the company’s customers didn’t know they were looking for until they found it.
“We find a lot of customers who tried the EC2 route, or another virtual server cloud, and they weren’t happy with the performance,” he says, “so they decided to go with dedicated servers or they’re buying their own servers and looking for a place to collocate them. And then we find that customer and we introduce them to our system, and they go with us.”
Judging by the number of customers EC2 serves, and its rate of growth, there’s obviously a large group of customers that find the solution does meet its needs. But for others, the dedicated server cloud can be a revelation.
For just about anyone, it’s a reminder that the definition for cloud computing is still being written, and that it is a space that invites experimentation.
