(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — UK web hosting provider Memset (www.memset.com) unveiled last week its virtualization strategy, which includes a Miniserver architecture that allows the company to offer one of the most affordable cloud service on the market.
According to Memset, the company’s Miniserver architecture “goes against the widely accepted vendor-led wisdom of using large, expensive servers and SANs for virtualization.”
Instead, Memset uses 1U quad-core servers with 16GB RAM and two 1,500GB SATA disks in a RAID1 configuration.
The company offers the Dell R300 server, where each of the four CPU cores are divided into eight virtual cores using the open source Xen hypervisor, the RAM is split into dedicated chunks, and dedicated disk partitions are provisioned using LVM.
“Using larger machines with more disks does not get around that bottleneck either, since even with a RAID5 array you are bumping into the fact that you have to wait for a rotating disk to go through roughly half a revolution before you can read data,” says Kate Craig-Wood, managing director of Memset. “Our long-experience in the field has shown that using simple, commodity boxes is the best way to host virtual machines.”
Memset’s Miniserver VM product recently upgraded its resource allocations.
The solution is considered one of the most affordable virtualization solutions on the UK market, with the VM1000 product priced at £9.95 per month for 512MB RAM with one virtual core.
Memset says its cloud solution is more cost-effective than Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service for businesses that run applications which need one or more small servers that are available around the clock.
The company’s gross revenues have increased by 8 percent since January, which it attributes to the demand for IT infrastructure outsourcing during the recession.
Craig-Wood recently won the Demeter award at the 2008 NatWest Everywoman National Awards.
