The VAR Guy is booked to meet software giants and disruptive upstarts at Parallels Summit 2010 in Miami. Among the anticipated meetings: A sit-down with Cloud Linux Inc. founder and CEO Igor Seletskiy. The big question: Does the hosting world really need yet another Linux distribution? Seletskiy and Cloud Linux certainly seem to think so. Here’s why.
During a Feb. 23 keynote, Seletskiy is expected to describe how hosting service providers can leverage CloudLinux to maintain balance between number of users per server and the load the server can carry. The Parallels event is expected to mark the first time Seletskiy takes the stage to talk about the CloudLinux OS.
Launched in 2009 and based in Princeton, N.J., Cloud Linux claims the company’s CloudLinux OS is the “only Linux–based, commercially supported operating system (OS) optimized for shared hosting providers and datacenters.”
Hmmm… The VAR Guy is always skeptical when technology companies claim to have the “first” or “only” offering in a particular market. No doubt, folks like Red Hat and Novell have been working with Linux-centric service providers for several years.
In fact, Red Hat even has a cloud certification for its partners. And Novell will be at the Parallels event talking up cloud computing. Oh, and Canonical‘s Ubuntu Server Edition now ships with Eucalyptus-based cloud software.
Still, the CloudLinux OS seems to be catching on fast with a few partners. True believers in the operating system appear to include Cartika, Altaire, VPS.NET, ServeTheWorld, Lions Park and SingleHop, according to a prepared Cloud Linux Inc. statement.
So what makes CloudLinux OS different from other Linux distributions? Cloud Linux Inc. offers up the following example and claims:
Hosting providers often host thousands of customers on one server so, if not monitored, just a few clients can affect performance of the entire server adversely. With CloudLinux OS, service providers can now control CPU resources, significantly improving operations and customer performance. Its cutting-edge technology offers service providers and datacenters the ability to double the density on its servers and control server resources via its new Lightweight Virtual Environment™ (LVE) that optimizes the number of users on a server while maintaining a high level of server stability. Priced at a fraction of the cost of other options, CloudLinux LVE provides datacenter and service providers the ability to host more websites per server, and is optimized to work with hosting control panels, delivering faster updates.
Those are some lofty claims. The VAR Guy wonders: Can CloudLinux OS live up to those marketing statements? The VAR Guy will search for answers at this week’s Parallels Summit in Miami.
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Hi VAR guy –
Judy here from CloudLinux and prepare to be convinced
CloudLinux is the only OS that lets web hosts manage their servers at an individual user level. That is not something you will find with any other OS… bet’cha.
I understand your skepticism but it is why 6 partners signed up within our first 30 days.
Enjoy the show.
Judy Shapiro
P.S. – Let me know if you want a chat with Igor Seletskiy, the CEO at the show…
Judy: The VAR Guy appreciates your enthusiasm. And our resident blogger — if he exists — is set to meet Seletskiy at the conference. But thank you for the meeting offer.
-TVG
What is LVE? Is it OpenVZ? Is it something else? If something else, is it like OpenVZ, Linux-VServer, and or LXE?
I’d love an interview opportunity… for my website. I’ve interviewed the OpenVZ Project head, the leader of Linux-VServer, and some Red Hat guys about RHEV… and the Proxmox VE guys too. I’m primarily a OpenVZ user and very involved in the OpenVZ community.
The CloudLinux website has almost no technical content and is mostly marketing speak. Confusion exists because of that. One has to wonder if that is on purpose… or perhaps you are wanting to keep certain things under wraps before you have a a big announcement?
Hi Scott –
It’d be our pleasure to talk to you – just let me know what works.
As far as what LVE is – a more detailed explanation will be on the site as a white paper very soon (next 9 days). But here’s a summary to provide context.
LVE technology is implemented right at the core of the operating system – the Linux kernel which employs a fair-share scheduler that limits the share of the CPU that each tenant gets. This ensures that all tenants receive sufficient server resources even if one site has a resource spike which, with any other OS, means that the server can become less responsive for all other sites or worse the server can go down.
LVE works by transparently giving each user their own “Lightweight Virtual Environment” so that before a website can execute any script, it is first placed in LVE and then executed under LVE constraints preventing any site from exceeding its resource limits.
The ability to manage a server at an individual user level is the key advantage (and differentiator) of CloudLinux’s LVE approach.
And yes – your hunch is right — we wanted to do a big launch at the Parallel Show where the CloudLinux CEO is presenting a proprietary study on the issues of server management and how LVE solves those issues.
We are working hard to get all this content on the site as fast as we can…
Thanks so much for your interest and patience.
Judy Shapiro