Parallels declassified Cloud Server

Hi, Habr. Some time ago I told you how we in Parallels implemented a software solution for organizing a distributed cloud storage. At the beginning of February, the Parallels Summit was officially announced by the Parallels Cloud Server. At his presentation, there were several interesting facts, including the answer to the question about prices, which worried the readers of the previous article. Those who are interested, I invite under the cat.


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Creating Parallels Cloud Server, we went from the needs of small hosters. The Parallels Plesk Panel experience suggested: small and medium-sized providers require a multifunctional solution. Therefore, Parallels Cloud Server is a hybrid virtualization platform (hypervisors + containers) with distributed cloud storage. Between us, it is Storage that is of particular interest to partners. “Hybridization” reduces downtime due to hardware failures, simplifies server support and administration, and also allows you to create efficient and highly available virtual servers with very good uptime performance.

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Before starting to create PCS, we conducted a study of solutions for distributed data storage. The survey helped to understand that there was no perfect solution at the time.



The second stage was the work with hosters. We contacted six providers (among them were Russian companies) and asked for access to the statistics of the disk subsystems of their servers. On average, on each server for VPS hosting, the amount of available space was 1 TB, and the occupancy varied from 14% to 50 and averaged 37%. That is, 63% of the valuable resource in the VPS hosting scenario is idle, while it could generate revenue for the provider.

I already wrote in detail about the architecture of the solution in detail. For those who are too lazy to read this great material , you can look at the picture, from which, in general, it is clear how everything works.



The summit made clear the key features of Parallels Cloud Server. Using PCS, small hosting companies can deploy resilient and scalable storage on existing hardware and increase the usage of server hard drives, which are now used by a little more than a third. In this case, the distributed storage system provides the performance as close as possible to local HDD / SSD. Hot-swappable disks are supported, they are automatically “sucked” into the cloud, which is then automatically balanced again. PCS can automatically detect failed nodes, and the user can specify an arbitrary level of redundancy. Another good news is that Parallels Cloud Server will soon be allocated Parallels Cloud Storage, which will work with other non-Parallel platforms for virtualization such as Xen and KVM.

How much is?

A little about the prices, especially since in the comments to the first post they asked about it . PCS is available under a leasing scheme. Let's see how much you need to pay deductions in favor of Parallels monthly. Take, for example, hosting implemented on two physical servers with 64 GB of RAM, two 4-core processors and 2 TB of disk space. There are two servers, because this is the only way to implement the minimum storage redundancy in the PCS.

Deductions for the two servers will look like this. Creation of 150-200 containers - $ 200 per month. Distributed storage with a total capacity of 4 TB - $ 306 per month. Software Rebootless addon for 2 servers - $ 20 per month. Total - $ 526.

If something is left behind the scenes, ask questions, I will answer them.