Why Don’t More Hosting Companies Offer Solaris?
It’s frustrating. Imagine you want to buy some low-cost, dedicated servers (or virtualised servers). You will manage these servers, but they will be hosted in a remote data center. Now, you have a number of great choices if you want to use Linux or Windows as your server operating system; but what if you want to use Solaris? As far as I can see, in that case, you have almost no choice at all…
If you want to use Solaris, pretty much the only game in town for high-quality, reasonably priced Solaris hosting is Joyent’s TextDrive service – specifically their Accelerator Hosting offerings. Joyent is doing some great things with Solaris and has put together some compelling infrastructure (as well as having the advantage of employing the mighty Ben Rockwood). However, to my mind there’s a potential issue if you’re doing anything that’s at all CPU-intensive. And that issue is: you get only a fraction of CPU in your Accelerator (aka virtualised Solaris Zone). For $125 per month, you get a guaranteed 1/16 (one sixteenth) of a CPU (Update: see comments it seems this might actually be 1/16 of total CPU resources i.e. equivalent to 1/4 of a CPU core).
Now, I like Joyent’s offering a lot – their infrastructure design is incredibly elegant (not to mention, state-of-the-art). There’s no doubt about it, they’re an impressive outfit. However, if you want a completely dedicated CPU at a good price, it would also be nice to be able to consider an offering like that of ServerBeach. ServerBeach has a great offering too. However, they take a different approach to Joyent – using commodity hardware and simple infrastructure.
The net result of that is: for the same price as an entry-level fractional CPU Solaris Accelerator Zone from Joyent, you could get a completely dedicated server with 100% of an Athlon XP2600 from ServerBeach. There’s only one problem – ServerBeach doesn’t offer Solaris. I’m not sure why – it’s not like it would be either particularly difficult or expensive.
So, there we have it… Why don’t more hosting companies offer Solaris?
Robert Miggins wrote:
Simon,
ServerBeach does not offer Solaris primarily because we seldomly have requests for it. However, Open Solaris may change that so we’re keeping our ears open on it. Feel free to pass on your thoughts as well.
This may be a small consolation, but if you really need a commodity server running solaris, you *could* get a linux server from ServerBeach, boot into rescue mode using our Rapid Rescue tool and install Solaris yourself. This is a bit complicated and would limit our ability to support you fully, but is an option nonetheless.
Best of luck and call me if you need more details. 210.798.4407
Regards,
Robert Miggins
VP ServerBeach
Posted 26 Feb 2007 at 6:12 am ¶
simon wrote:
Thanks for this Robert.
I guess there’s an element of “chicken and egg” about “getting requests for Solaris” and offering it. Open Solaris would be great option.
Solaris is free too, BTW. And supported Solaris is much cheaper than supported Red Hat Linux for many hardware configurations (including, I *think*, all the configurations that Server Beach offers).
I will look into your Rapid Rescue tool, and see how it works – thanks for the tip.
Posted 26 Feb 2007 at 7:49 am ¶
Adam Lindsay wrote:
I believe the $125 accelerator product is selling 1/16 of the quad-core CPU resources, or, 1/4 of a CPU. I’m not sure, but this is the distinct impression I’ve had for a while, bolstered by the fact that they boast of servers with 4GiB RAM per processor. That way, the numbers definitely add up.
Posted 26 Feb 2007 at 12:12 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Adam, I think you might be right… It looks like Joyent have just updated their web-site (maybe yesterday/today) – a total site redesign (used to be TextDrive Accelerators, now they’re Joyent Accelerators).
When I look at the descriptions of Accelerators…
http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/pricing/
… it says “Guaranteed 1/16 of CPU resources”
That seems to imply it could be 1/16 of the CPU resources of the entire server… which I guess is 2 dual core Opterons. Which as you say, equates to 1/4 of a core guaranteed minimum (burstable up to 95% of total server CPU resources).
Posted 26 Feb 2007 at 1:48 pm ¶
Jason Hoffman wrote:
Our use of Solaris has yielded so many advantages that it would require a nice historical weblog post to cover them.
For the questions of capacity:
The fact is that people tend to not constantly use CPU, but do relatively need a lot of memory. So that means people are guaranteed a minimum that matches their RAM well.
Then they’re allowed to burst up and use up to 16 CPUs in a given spot as long as no one else is using it.
So it’s being given minimums that are “normal” in that you’d expect to be able to have that much CPU in a “normal” server and then the rest if governed by a fair share algorithm.
This when combined with being able to quickly scale horizontally and be load balanced by F5 BIG-IPs is powerful.
Thank you for the mention.
- Jason (Founder/CTO of Joyent)
Posted 26 Feb 2007 at 9:52 pm ¶
Anil wrote:
Here is a new one, http://entic.net/servers
Good and competitive pricing, based on Solaris zones.
Posted 10 Apr 2007 at 6:27 pm ¶
Phil wrote:
Two more Solaris 10 hosting providers providing zones :
http://www.gridzones.com
http://www.sparsezone.com
Posted 25 Sep 2007 at 12:45 am ¶