A screenshot of the provisioning area of the end-user interface in the VMOps cloud hosting platform.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloud computing is an area of the hosting that sees a lot of debate, ranging from usage cases to best practices to what exactly constitutes cloud computing, but there seems to be general consensus, first, that cloud-based hosting is an attractive market for a hosting provider to be in, and secondly that designing and building an engine for cloud computing is a large and complex development undertaking.
For smaller hosts, or those late to start designing cloud solutions, a few reseller options have emerged, but there are ways to build your own cloud without developing the platform itself.
Just like control panels, virtualization – even web server software – technologies that become essential to the hosting business tend to made available as third party tools, which is exactly what the cloud software company VMOps (www.vmops.com) intends to do with its cloud hosting platform.
“We sell a platform that allows hosting companies to build an EC2-like computing cloud,” says Shannon Wiliams, VP of business development at VMOps. “Our customers are typically companies who want to compete with Amazon or Rackspace or GoGrid or Joyent or somebody who has launched a cloud, but they don’t want to have a development team themselves. They want to license a software package.”
There are other third-party platform technologies out there, of course, including those from 3Tera, Parallels, VMware, Microsoft, Mezeo, ParaScale and others, that can be used to put together a cloud computing product without too much internal development. What might be the distinguishing feature of the VMOps platform is that the company designed the product as a platform specifically for hosting providers looking to distribute services in precisely this model.
“We’ve built a system that is really designed for service providers from the ground up,” says Williams. “We weren’t a grid computing company that decided to try to go after this market. We weren’t a virtualization company. We built a platform that we tailored for service providers, and we wanted to go after hosting companies.”
Williams says VMOps platform is built to run on commodity hardware – and not a tremendous amount of it to start. Customer implementations, during the testing phases, have started with a pod of as few as five or six X86 servers, along with a gigabit switch and a storage server. The customer runs the basic VMOps management layer, a multi-tenant hypervisor built on Xen – and run the management server, which includes the user interface, on top of that.
“Our customers really start with as few as five or maybe six physical servers that make up a cloud. And they go right on up past multiple data centers, running five or 10 fully-owned data centers with hundreds of physical nodes in each. So it covers a pretty broad stretch of the market. It’s designed for multiple availability zones, and lots of scale. But it really can be consumed as small as less than a rack of servers.”
The VMOps platform has been in development, mostly under the radar, for just over a year. The company began building late in 2008 and introduced an early beta in April of 2009. Williams said the company’s beta program snowballed to include 25 hosting companies testing the software through three or four rounds of development. The generally available 1.0 software was released in November.
A couple of those participants in the software beta have launched public betas of cloud offerings based on VMOps. Minnesota service provider VISI (www.visi.com) has launched its ReliaCloud (www.reliacloud.com), and Australian cloud service Cloud Central (www.cloudcentral.com.au) opened its doors. Williams says more launches are on the way.
The VMOps cloud stack includes a customizable end user interface that lets cloud hosting customers turn on and off, and configure, virtual machines based on images made available by their hosting providers. End users can also configure a variety of network settings from their interface. The platform includes an API as well as a powerful host-facing management layer that enables the host running the platform to manage infrastructure in multiple data centers from one interface. A video explaining some of the technology behind the platform is available from the VMOps website.
According to Williams, there’s a basic business model for cloud computing – a rate that resources generate, whether billed hourly or monthly – that the company has worked to build into the software’s cost. Licensed per server per year, based on the physical machines underlying the cloud, the VMOps platform should cost less than 10 percent of the revenue the servers generate, he says.
Like a control panel, or even an operating system, an off-the-shelf platform for cloud hosting could have the effect of making cloud computing offerings a possibility for hosting companies without the resources to develop that kind of technology themselves.
“To build this type of a cloud stack, you have to solve a whole bunch of problems underneath,” says Williams. “You need to have hardware, you need to have an integrated approach to network and storage management, you need to have an integrated hypervisor, you need a service management approach, an end user interface, an API. All these things are necessary, and if you look at guys like Amazon and Rackspace and Go Grid, all the early players, they built all this themselves. They all have development teams of 30 people that have worked on doing the network integration with storage, and storage integration with the hypervisor and building their APIs. We also have that big team engineers, but we’ve done it in a way that is licensable, so that anyone can do this. And the architecture is very similar.”
FIND OUT MORE: Shannon Williams and Jason Baker, CTO of VISI, will join WHIR editor Liam Eagle for a live webinar entitled “How to Build a Computing Cloud” on Thursday, January 21. For more information and to register for the session, which will include a user Q&A period, visit the webinar registration page.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
