vCluster package structure for version 2
By Steve Wednesday, 16th May 2012
With the launch of CatN vCluster version 2 nearing, I will be following on from the previous posts introducing the new version and the vCluster timeline to explain one of the major changes we will be introducing. Previously we offered packages with a tiered pricing model, allowing you to select one of three pre-defined vClusters. After previewing an early alpha version at WordCamp last year as well as the feedback received from users of old version, we have dropped this rigid pricing structure in favour of a more flexible and customisable option.
When you purchase a vCluster in version 2, you will be faced with a single vCluster package option with a base subscription price of £5.00 per month. The package itself contains two products, one vCluster and a Shared Database, which are managed independently within the Control Panel and have their own add-ons and overage costs applied despite being part of the same package. read more…
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Openindiana vs Nexentastor vs FreeNAS
By Alex Friday, 11th May 2012
In my previous post I gave a (very) high level overview of ZFS and why I think it is a solid foundation for vCluster.
What I did not say though, was why we chose OpenIndiana over the other operating systems offering ZFS.
Just before Sun was bought by Oracle, Solaris came in 2 flavours. Solaris and Opensolaris. As the name suggests, OpenSolaris was open source and Solaris was the closed source variant. OpenSolaris was to become proper Solaris some day and development was to be made in the open. Because OpenSolaris was opensource, many different projects were born out of it. Nexetnta made a storage appliance. Belenix was a generic desktop with KDE. StormOS was a simple desktop with Xfce. FreeBSD which had lost it’s edge to Linux over the years, took the chance and ported ZFS with great success. Joyent based their cloud 100% on Opensolaris. They even offer their version, called SmartOS, free to download and use in production.
Alas, Sun was bought by Oracle, Oracle closed the Solaris source code and open development of OpenSolaris ended.
read more…
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An introduction to ZFS
By Alex Friday, 11th May 2012
One major part of the new vCluster release is storage. As you may know, vCluster uses NFS extensively, so we want to make sure that it works reliably. Reliability means that the data stored is always available, meaning that the server should be able to handle the load and be stable, but also that the data is written correctly and consistently on disk. We also need some kind of replication for backups and maybe fail over.
There are lots of systems we could use to serve NFS. There is Linux of course, FreeBSD, OpenIndiana and a slew of commercial solutions from companies like EMC, NetAPP, HP, Dell etc. Looking around and testing various solutions we decided that Openindiana is the best solution for our needs. The main reason is ZFS.
Some background
ZFS is a filesystem originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It was released in late 2005 in the development builds of Solaris. When it was released it obliterated anything freely available at the time. It had features that where not even in the radar of other filesystems. read more…
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Fake Corsair USB sticks
By Alex Thursday, 10th May 2012
Some days ago we ordered some 8GB USB sticks for our custom made storage systems (I’ll write several blog posts about this later). The sticks were Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB. I personally have one, albeit 4GB, and Ihave been using these for years now with great success.
When the sticks arrived, I opened one of them and I noticed something strange. The stick was smaller, lighter, the logo was a bit off and the colour of the stick was different.
Spot the fake:
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Explaining the vCluster Timeline
By Jonathon Wednesday, 9th May 2012
The parent company behind CatN, Fubra, has long had aspirations of providing a web hosting service. As the company has grown over the past 12 years it has had to overcome a multitude of hosting related problems and has always thought it was well positioned to help others when they found themselves navigating the same twisty road. Various versions of Fubra’s hosting product reached different levels of maturity; some never making it out of the conceptual stages, some never quite having the development resource to make a polished product. None ever made it to market. In 2010, however, the idea of the CatN vCluster was born. Fubra required a platform which could cope with the traffic levels it’s own sites were generating while being cost effective — they had outgrown traditional hosting offerings and therefore began to develop a new web hosting platform.
The first version of the CatN vCluster was built from an engineering point of view: it was feature rich but hard to maintain, stable but not designed for customers to interact with day-to-day. A team of web developers were brought into the project to develop a control panel which made a large part of the backend engineering code accessible to users and it was this which was launched as the vCluster public beta. This is the system which the majority of CatN vCluster clients currently use. However, while this system proved a large number of the key vCluster technologies, there were still a number of problems with the system which needed to be ironed out. Firstly there was a large amount of duplication in the management layer of the system and, while users didn’t see it, a number of settings were stored in multiple locations requiring each to be updated when any changes were requested. There were also speed issues with the control panel, as well as a number of other technical problems meaning the system required quite frequent maintenance. So in March 2011 a second round of development work started. read more…
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