Friday June 13, 2008
Zones (Containers) Hosting Providers
I've been keeping track of a number of companies who provide virtual server hosting based on Solaris Zones. Since we occasionally get asked about this, I thought I'd share my personal list. This is not an endorsement of these businesses. In the interest of full disclosure, I was once taken to lunch by David and Jason from Joyent. Sorted alphabetically:
- Avantic Software ("OpenSolaris on Coolthreads")
- BeaconVPS ("Affordable, High Quality Solaris VPS")
- Entic.net ("v.Dedicated Servers")
- Gangus Internet Services ("Virtual Servers for Hosting")
- Joyent ("Cloud Computing with Joyent Accelerators")
- SparseZone ("Superuser control over your own Solaris 10 server, without the hassles of hardware, OS and software maintenance.")
- Stability Hosting ("Ruby on Rails / Java Application Hosting on Solaris 10 Zones")
I'm pretty sure this list is incomplete. I'll try to keep it updated as I learn more. Feel free to post (or send me) corrections and additions, and I'll add them.
Finally, if you are a hosting provider, and want to consider adding zones to your suite of offerings, we're more than willing to talk, anytime.
Update #1: Added Gangus and Layered Technologies.
Update #2: Removed Layered Technologies (we're not sure); added Stability Hosting
Update #3 (6/30/2008): Added Beacon VPS (confirmed by email with Beacon)
(2008-06-13 00:42:42.0) Permalink Comments [14]
Tags: containers zones
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/dp/entry/zones_containers_hosting_providers
GridZones was the first to market, Joyent was the second. Navisite also has a product, supposedly its zones.
Both Joyent and Navisite are part of the Sun Startup Essential program.
Posted by benr on June 13, 2008 at 02:12 AM PDT #
Wow, I know I'm biased, but Avantic pricing is nuts... twice the cost of Joyent and they are using Niagara vs X86! Massive ripoff.
SparseZone is "full", so I can't see pricing. Their "zonectl" looks sorta spiffy though.
Entic is slightly cheaper than Joyent, however your getting half the CPU and I'm curious about the disk configuration (2x 15GB?) The downside here is primarily in the area of options and services... I don't see shared storage solutions, private networking, load balancing, any notes about network infrastructure, etc.
Posted by benr on June 13, 2008 at 02:27 AM PDT #
Until March 20008 we have been in business providing solaris zones. After massive problems with our zone roots beeing on iSCSI mounted disks (opensolaris zfs target) we switched to OpenSolaris 2008.5 domU running in Xen 3.2. So if anyone is interested in this configuration drop us a note.
Posted by Fank Fischer on June 13, 2008 at 02:48 AM PDT #
(For those who might not realize it, BenR works for Joyent).
@Ben, I thought sparsezone had pricing here? http://www.sparsezone.com/documentation/solaris-zones/bundle-pricing.php#bundleprices
I will look into Navisite. I had not previously heard of them. Thanks for the pointer.
I looked at Gridzones' site and had trouble determining if they are still offering containers hosting, or are doing something else. It's a bit opaque.
Posted by Dan Price on June 13, 2008 at 02:51 AM PDT #
@Fank, as a member of Solaris group, I would certainly be interested in the technical details of the problems you encountered, as we'd like to build a product which providers like you would like to use. It's awful for me when I hear about a customer giving up on zones, and we didn't get a chance to try to help them fix the issues. Feel free to drop me a line at daniel dot price at sun dot com.
Posted by Dan Price on June 13, 2008 at 02:55 AM PDT #
Looks like Entic bought out Gridzones : http://entic.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/enticnet-acquires-gridzonescoms-vps/ .
Really want a Joyent box but can't afford it, some of these are cheaper than my monthly gum bill. fully expect to get what I pay for, but at least I can afford the entry fee now.
Posted by Dick Davies on June 13, 2008 at 04:15 AM PDT #
@Dick: Wow, nice research! Thanks a ton!
Posted by Dan Price on June 13, 2008 at 09:34 AM PDT #
Re: LayeredTech. Is there any evidence that they are using Zones? From the looks of their infrastructure their "virtual" offering is Xen... but I may be mistaken. The only thing that suggests Zones is that when ordering "DTrace Enabled" is an option, which you could only enforce for Zones.
Posted by benr on June 13, 2008 at 01:15 PM PDT #
@benr: It was that clue, and this press release: http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/717311/
However it may be that I'm wrong.
Posted by Dan Price on June 13, 2008 at 03:49 PM PDT #
The biggest weakness of Solaris zones is that if the hardware dies, all those virtual servers go buh-bye. Instantly.
There is no redundancy built into the design of Solaris zones, and this is a major, major showstopper!
To wit, there are also no easily understandable, step-by-step documents that focus on Zones being complemented with Sun or OpenHA cluster to provide for at least some redundancy.
I believe this should be looked into, and solved with high priority.
Posted by UX-admin on June 14, 2008 at 03:11 AM PDT #
@UX-Admin: This seems like a pretty big topic to try to cover in the comments section of my blog. Since there *is* existing work in this area, I'd encourage you to bring your comments to zones-discuss@opensolaris.org-- where you will likely hear from community members with diverse viewpoints. Thanks!
Posted by Dan Price on June 16, 2008 at 10:02 PM PDT #
@benr: You get a mirrored partition so that's what 2x 15GB means. Its a 2 disk 15GB mirror. Our servers have large number of drive bays so not sure a shared storage option is required. We mention on the site that we use Internap (a premium quality network) - though there is no specific page about that, something to fix in the future.
Posted by Anil on June 22, 2008 at 10:53 AM PDT #
DP: agreed. Perhaps you could cover step-by-step Sun Cluster + zones in one of your posts?
You'd have at least one guaranteed reader! (;-)
Posted by UX-admin on June 26, 2008 at 05:00 AM PDT #
@Benr We (Avantic) are location in Australia, Bandwidth is much more expensive here ie, 10T would cost a few thousand dollars a month. From what I remember your Niagara pricing was not too much different from ours.. All our clients are from the Asia Pacific region, we occasionally get a stray from the US, but we cannot compete with your bandwidth pricing.
Posted by Jason on June 26, 2008 at 06:58 AM PDT #