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  1. #51
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    Ignoring arguments that a cloud is by definition 'scalable' (and therefore not 1 server!) I agree with everything Andrew just said!

    Cloud barriers to entry are significantly higher than reseller plans. The 'going rate' for even a small starter OnApp cluster is in the region of $1500 per month, plus $500 for OnApp - not exactly a hostgater reseller plan! (and you've to manage it all yourself)

  2. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    Ignoring arguments that a cloud is by definition 'scalable' (and therefore not 1 server!) I agree with everything Andrew just said!

    Cloud barriers to entry are significantly higher than reseller plans. The 'going rate' for even a small starter OnApp cluster is in the region of $1500 per month, plus $500 for OnApp - not exactly a hostgater reseller plan! (and you've to manage it all yourself)
    I agree with you.. but I think you are missing the point here.

    We all know there is a vast number of small hosting company's who really don't care about the true definition of "cloud" or about anything nice like quality. Right? It's sad, but true.

    These company's just want to be able to get a server or two, install the simple cloud softare, and have the potential to easily expand as needed. No need to buy a SAS, fiddle with controller servers, etc. Just install the cloud software, plugin the servers, and start creating VMs. They're looking for the lowest cost entry point into the "cloud hosting" market.

    Those are the people I'm talking about who will drive the "one or two server cloud" type of capability.

    Yes, I agree it doesn't make sense and is not a good quality cloud. But it's inevitable. Eventually, some cloud software maker is going to let their software work on a single (or two) server setup, make it super simple,and charge just a few dollars for it.

    And that is the cloud software that is going to win the popularity vote, and many thousands of thousands of new hosting companies who offer "cloud hosting" will suddenly come online, flooding the market with "WE OFFER CLOUD HOSTING" advertising.

    These hosting companies don't care about quality. They care about marketing and sales. If they can install cloud software onto one or two servers for just a few $$ and call it "cloud hosting", then they will. And they'll do it by the thousands.

    It's exactly the same as how the reseller hosting works now. There are high quality providers who have super-powerful servers with awesome RAID, tons of RAM, etc. and then there are the low-end providers who just get a $50 server and install WHM. Both of them offer the same thing -- reseller plans -- although with vastly different quality.
    Last edited by mrzippy; 10-15-2012 at 07:30 AM.
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  3. #53
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    I do take your point and agree in broad terms.

    But cloud needs 'more' than just a server - if you want that, there are virtualisation alternatives designed to work that way (like solus, proxmox, etc)

    'Cloud' needs more complex networking, etc, than 'out of the box' dedicated servers can deliver - even with vSAN, you will need multiple connections between the servers, etc.

  4. #54
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    Quote Originally Posted by mrzippy View Post
    I agree with you.. but I think you are missing the point here.

    We all know there is a vast number of small hosting company's who really don't care about the true definition of "cloud" or about anything nice like quality. Right? It's sad, but true.

    These company's just want to be able to get a server or two, install the simple cloud softare, and have the potential to easily expand as needed. No need to buy a SAS, fiddle with controller servers, etc. Just install the cloud software, plugin the servers, and start creating VMs. They're looking for the lowest cost entry point into the "cloud hosting" market.

    Those are the people I'm talking about who will drive the "one or two server cloud" type of capability.

    Yes, I agree it doesn't make sense and is not a good quality cloud. But it's inevitable. Eventually, some cloud software maker is going to let their software work on a single (or two) server setup, make it super simple,and charge just a few dollars for it.

    And that is the cloud software that is going to win the popularity vote, and many thousands of thousands of new hosting companies who offer "cloud hosting" will suddenly come online, flooding the market with "WE OFFER CLOUD HOSTING" advertising.

    These hosting companies don't care about quality. They care about marketing and sales. If they can install cloud software onto one or two servers for just a few $$ and call it "cloud hosting", then they will. And they'll do it by the thousands.

    It's exactly the same as how the reseller hosting works now. There are high quality providers who have super-powerful servers with awesome RAID, tons of RAM, etc. and then there are the low-end providers who just get a $50 server and install WHM. Both of them offer the same thing -- reseller plans -- although with vastly different quality.
    Its an interesting point your making, possibly what SolusVM were getting into with their non-existant SolusVMv2 release.

    This is where something like Proxmox comes in.

    Its free, has the whole HA speal, migration, possiblity for SAN Storage.

    Its pretty good, runs fine, and you can install it on one server. Has its own ISO for installation. Its simple, and powerful at the same time.

    My 0.02.

  5. #55
    Quote Originally Posted by dediserve View Post
    'Cloud' needs more complex networking, etc, than 'out of the box' dedicated servers can deliver - even with vSAN, you will need multiple connections between the servers, etc.

    Yes, I agree.. sortof. A cloud does not need more then an out-of-the-box dedicated server can deliver. It simply should have more then an out-of-the-box dedicated server can deliver.

    A cloud can run on a single server. It is barely a cloud, by definition. I agree.

    But my point is that the vast majority of cheap hosting providers aren't going to care about that. Just like they don't care about getting a $50 dedicated server, putting WHM on it and advertising "high quality" reseller accounts on their sales website.

    The cheapo new hosting providers who want to get into the cloud hosting market don't care about things like "multiple connections between the servers". They just want something that will let them advertise "cloud hosting" and be very low cost.

    For example, with the new v3 of onApp, you don't even need to deal with drives. The software can simply use whatever drives are local to the hypervisor servers. This allows the hosting provider to completely avoid the question of whether their considered drives are good or bad quality. The question won't even come up. The cloud software will simply add the drives, and it's done.

    Will onApp work with a single connection between two servers? I don't know. Certainly not very well. But that isn't going to matter to the small hosting provider who just wants a cheap way to offer "cloud hosting" to their customers with the ability to easily plug a new dedi server into their cloud when needed.

    My point is that there is a big market opportunity here for some cloud software provider to offer super simple cloud software that works with regular "out of the box" servers and does not require anything more then a small license fee and "plug server into switch". No special networking requirements, no special drive requirements, etc.

    This is completely different then creating a proper cloud and doing it correctly (as you and I would do it).

    I hope that makes more sense?

    Again, I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying (imho) that it's inevitable. There is no way this cloud hosting stuff is going to stay in the domain of big service providers only. As soon as a cloud software provider offers low-cost license.. it's going to take the hosting world by storm.
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  6. #56
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    This is why I hate the "cloud" terminology, no one can agree on what it really means... At this point, a consumer REALLY needs to look into the specifics of every single platform and provider they're looking into as everyone is different.

    To us, it means high availability, high scalability, on-demand, etc. There is no reason that can't be delivered with dedicated hardware, so why the dependence on virtualization to call it "cloud"?

    To answer the OPs question, CloudStack is still a mess, I wouldn't trust it. OpenStack is still way too early, if you have a full dedicated development team you might be able to work something out. And although OnApp has had some big QA issues, I guess it is still the best one out there, that I've seen and they're constantly getting better. Even software put out by Cisco just looks sad at this point...
    Karl Zimmerman - Founder & CEO of Steadfast
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  7. #57
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    Quote Originally Posted by KarlZimmer View Post
    To answer the OPs question, CloudStack is still a mess, I wouldn't trust it. OpenStack is still way too early, if you have a full dedicated development team you might be able to work something out. And although OnApp has had some big QA issues, I guess it is still the best one out there, that I've seen and they're constantly getting better. Even software put out by Cisco just looks sad at this point...
    A few comments from a guy that has tried a few of these:
    Openstack - Still a development project, lots of moving parts. Instrumentation and API getting better every day, but changes are fast and frequent.

    OnApp - Before I sold my data center and got into service provider hardware, I used OnApp. The sales and marketing obviously has the most $$$ behind it, but the QA is non-existent. It's a black box, so when it breaks and you are in a US time zone, good luck. You have to give OnApp root privileges to your cloud. Storage model is weak. Migration to and from OnAPP is impossible. Licensing model is questionable. It's still a "spray painted turd" in my opinion, but is getting better. UI is decent.

    CloudStack - In my opinion, the best of the big OS projects. My new company offers private label cloud hosting, and we build turnkey cloud infrastructures, and I chose CS to do it on. It has a very good development community, and suppport isn't too bad. You can get paid support from Citrix, although the Citrix cloud folks aren't exactly sure how to license and sell the support yet. Very good API and instrumentation, aimed squarely at service providers. Very detailed install guide. You have to follow the install to the letter, or start all over from scratch. Flubbing even a tiny detail on install may require complete re-installation. Citrix Backed (plus, or minus? not sure yet). Apache Incubator project, donated by Citrix (a plus). Very neat networking model that works well, but once a VM is created, you can't add a NIC. Storage model very good, as long as its NFS or iSCSI, but that poses 0 issue for most. Skinny Provisioning on NFS. Very Nice web UI. One odd part of Cloudstack is that it's been a "product" for several years, from Cloud.com, but it's still very heavily developed, so it's hard to believe it was ever used in production when it was still private at cloud.com cloud.com must have been a VC backed operation that spent a bunch of money, then folded and covered that up by open sourcing the entire project.

    I actually never got OpenStack running with any degree of confidence, so I don't have as much input on that platform, and as much development that's behind it, I dont see many companies actually using it.
    Nik Martin
    nfina Technologies, Inc.
    +1.251.243.0043 x1003
    Server Hardware, Storage, and Turnkey systems for Service Providers

  8. #58
    Hi Nik,

    when did you try OnApp? I am not sure your comments are completely fair, but, our experience with them is more recent. Their product looks good, we were able to import a couple of VMs from xenserver during our testing without issue. Nice interface, some really nice bells and whistles. We never did try using their support however...

    having said this, we ended up choosing Flexiant and are in the middle of deployment as we speak. You should consider adding them to your list and at least taking a look..
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  9. #59
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    Quote Originally Posted by nik martin View Post
    OnApp - Before I sold my data center and got into service provider hardware, I used OnApp. The sales and marketing obviously has the most $$$ behind it, but the QA is non-existent. It's a black box, so when it breaks and you are in a US time zone, good luck. You have to give OnApp root privileges to your cloud. Storage model is weak. Migration to and from OnAPP is impossible. Licensing model is questionable. It's still a "spray painted turd" in my opinion, but is getting better. UI is decent.
    When we tried OnApp a while back, our experience was positive.
    OnApp software worked well for us. We never needed to call OnApp for support.

    We ended up choosing VMware because of flexibility and cost. Surprisingly, we found the total cost of using VMware is lower (vs OnApp) when you factor in software license fees, hardware costs, and time in managing the cloud infrastructure. We use HP blade servers with NetApp SAN. We never have any issues with VMware software. It is rock solid.
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  10. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by nik martin View Post
    One odd part of Cloudstack is that it's been a "product" for several years, from Cloud.com, but it's still very heavily developed, so it's hard to believe it was ever used in production when it was still private at cloud.com cloud.com must have been a VC backed operation that spent a bunch of money, then folded and covered that up by open sourcing the entire project.
    Hi, Nik. Citrix actually bought Cloud.com last year - Citrix Buys Cloud.com for More Than $200 Million

    CloudStack was mostly open source before the acquisition (IIRC only vSphere support was missing), fully open source (GPL v3) shortly thereafter, and donated to Apache earlier this year. Cloud.com did have paying customers running CloudStack in production (e.g. Zynga - The final piece of Zynga’s Z Cloud revealed). The old CloudStack 2.2.x series released by Cloud.com is still maintained and supported.

  11. #61
    Join Date
    Jan 2012
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    Nothing comes close to Onapp looking at out of box experience you get on a small scale.

    integrated DNS
    - saves cash, equipment, time to manage your own DNS network
    integrated CDN
    - dont have to care about integration (saves cash)
    integrated tons of images
    - dont have to worry about upgrades (saves cash)
    integrated iphone/android apps for management
    - nice to have
    integrated nice UI
    - nice to have

    but ... looking at some other options, there are some with better feature sets looking towards enterprise users, unfortunately we found they lack in "vps/smb" marketplace features and out of box experience.

    If you are a one man team, time to market of onapp is crazy fast. And you will get most of things you need out of box.

    If you have few engineers, requests from customers for some custom configurations, your own network, dns, etc... there are valid options like vCloud/Flexiant/*stack.

  12. #62
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    We looked at OnApp and decided to go with CA Applogic.

  13. #63
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    Apr 2002
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    Quote Originally Posted by FHDave View Post
    We looked at OnApp and decided to go with CA Applogic.
    Can you explain why?

  14. #64
    Quote Originally Posted by FHDave View Post
    We looked at OnApp and decided to go with CA Applogic.
    we really like the applogic technology - ahead of its time with its replicated local storage architecture

    what are you using for billing/automation? havent looked in awhile, but, have they improved in this area? or have 3rd parties stepped up and offer integration with it?
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