The VAR Guy

The Planet has launched Server Cloud, marking the Texas-based company’s entrance into the scalable platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market. The move comes as The Planet and other major hosting providers prepare to converge on HostingCon (July 19-21, Austin, Texas). Here’s what hosting resellers and developers should know.

As The VAR Guy previously reported, The Planet Server Cloud is built around the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor — reflecting the hosting company’s belief in KVM’s future. The Planet isn’t alone. Red Hat’s CEO recently predicted that its KVM efforts would leapfrog VMware vSphere over time.

Still, betting a cloud strategy on KVM involves some challenges. The downside for The Planet’s customers, of course, is the potential inconvenience of converting existing VMs over to KVM.

Moreover, The Planet’s press release indicates a strong technology base underpinning the platform — Sun SANs, a Cisco- and Juniper-powered network, Intel Nehalem processors, and Dell servers. The Planet is also touting the high availability and easy scalability of their platform, saying that developers running applications on Server Cloud can easily boost resources to meet demand.

Embracing the Channel

But of real note to the channel, says Carl Meadows, senior product manager for cloud services with The Planet, is the Server Cloud’s value proposition to smaller resellers and ISVs looking for cloud services. Meadows says he’s heard from customers who are migrating to Server Cloud from competitors where they spend more on bandwidth than on computing costs.

To that end, Meadows says that the Server Cloud includes 1TB of bandwidth with the service, and gave their $99/month virtual server with one processor and 4GB of RAM as an example of the kind of affordability they’re aiming to provide smaller reseller organizations looking to expand their hosting profile.

It’s an intriguing play, especially since it seems to have been conceived with SaaS-delivering VARs and ISVs in mind. But only time will tell if The Planet’s focus on value is enough to cause ripples in a cloud platform market dominated by players like The Rackspace Cloud.

Next Moves

Speaking of Rackspace, the company has recruited AMD and Extreme Networks channel veterans to help build the hosting company’s partner program. And numerous hosting companies are expected to further discuss their various cloud and SaaS strategies during HostingCon 2010 (July 19-21, Austin, Texas).

The VAR Guy’s blog team may hitch a ride to Texas to learn more…

Additional reporting by Joe Panettieri. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. And follow him via RSS; Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter.

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