Comments on: Why Don’t More Hosting Companies Offer Solaris?

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:45:51 +0000

Two more Solaris 10 hosting providers providing zones :

http://www.gridzones.com
http://www.sparsezone.com

By: Anil

Anil — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:27:18 +0000

Here is a new one, http://entic.net/servers
Good and competitive pricing, based on Solaris zones.

By: Jason Hoffman

Jason Hoffman — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:52:51 +0000

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)

By: simon

simon — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:48:15 +0000

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).

By: Adam Lindsay

Adam Lindsay — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:12:11 +0000

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.

By: simon

simon — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:49:32 +0000

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.

By: Robert Miggins

Robert Miggins — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 06:12:18 +0000

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