Media Temple To Announce Nitro: Bringing Virtualization to Dedicated Physical Servers
Media Temple, which hosts Read/WriteWeb, is announcing a brand new product at Hosting Con in Chicago this coming Tuesday evening PST. It's called the Nitro and Read/WriteWeb is the first to bring you this news. Nitro is a Dedicated Physical Virtual Server (dpv), but it comes with the same virtualization technology that powers their virtual dedicated server solutions (dv).
R/WW is currently hosted on the Grid Server, although we're being migrated to a Dedicated Virtual server (we discovered the hard way that we need a DV). With our current growth patterns, the Nitro will be the next move. And the idea with Nitro is to make such migrations easy for the customer and seamless, even if they have customized their dv setup. As MediaTemple told me, the Nitro makes "hardware upgrades less painful and more organic like a software upgrade, instead of having to manually configure the new box."
Nitro is also easily stackable, says Media Temple, and so it can scale to "mammoth proportions". So this kind of hosting solution is good for social apps and sites; for example MySkitch (the online photo editing/sharing platform) already uses it.
Virtualization
I'm certainly no expert when it comes to web hosting, but it's interesting to see virtualization technology being used so much in this new generation of web host solutions. In other words, web hosting (a foundation technology for web apps and websites) is itself being transformed by Web technology. Media Temple calls this 'Virtualization Technology' - and I'm sure this trend is happening on other web hosting services too. It means for example that users have Web-based remote start/stop/reboot capabilities.
Here's how Media Temple explains the difference between a a (dv) Dedicated-Virtual server and a (dpv) Dedicated-Physical Virtual Server (a.k.a. Nitro):
"While a (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server has guaranteed resources and everything is isolated, it still "lives" on a host server that controls other virtual servers on the same hardware. To contrast, a (dpv) utilizes the full allocation of hardware resources on its own host machine. The (dpv) is a single-tenant platform as opposed to the (dv), which is a multi-tenant platform at the hardware level."
Meanwhile the difference between the (dpv) and a regular dedicated physical server is the "layer of virtualization", which essentially allows you to control your server in the browser, through a point-and-click interface.
Conclusion
The whole virtualization trend is an exciting aspect of today's Web - we've been tracking it with WebOS products. And as Nitro shows, virtualization is also transforming the business of web hosting.
Disclosure: Read/WriteWeb is hosted on Media Temple.
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I would reconsider the part about Second Life. It's really having quite little to do with virtualization as it is related to servers.
Good point Someone, I deleted that bit.
Hi,
About virtualisation and how it could change desktops and consumer apps, here is a small post I have written a few weeks ago:
http://www.deviant-abstraction.net/index.php/2007/05/24/from-web-applications-to-personal-virtual-machine/
Yep, all hosting companies are moving forward. Except GoDaddy.com of course. I really need to migrate.
Something I don't understand.
"(...) the difference between the (dpv) and a regular dedicated physical server is the "layer of virtualization", which essentially allows you to control your server in the browser, through a point-and-click interface."
But without virtualization it is already possible to control your server in the browser right? And since we are talking dedicated hosting here, having a complete (virtual) server on your own, including root permissions, is not an advantage either since you also have that with a non-virtual dedicated server.
Then what remains is hardware control. I totally see this point for virtual servers on a shared box, but for a virtual server on a dedicated box I don't see it. So you can play around with the hardware specs without having to touch your box... HOW? Any (virtual) specs below the physical box' actual specs is throwing away resources you have available anyway (no one else is using the box!), specs above the physical box' actual specs are, well... impossible.
P.S. Good thing they're trading the product under the nickname 'Nitro', because having the two words 'Physical Virtual' in consecutive order in the product is not really all that catchy ;).
I assume that a load balancer would be required in order for a single website to utilize all of those virtual servers effectively. Is that something the company supplies at an extra cost?
What's the price compared to the current dedicated virtual server?
@Tim Molendijk:
I suppose the advantage is in the fact that you can 'wrap up' your server in a virtual image and upload that to a bigger physical server (faster cpu / more memory / raid ) without having to reinstall or reconfigure anything. It's just an extra abstraction layer for the hardware.
Maybe it's even possible to recover from a virtual image in case of a hardware failure. (somewhat faster and less hardware dependant than normal backup-restore procedure)
At least, that's those are the only possible advantage I can come up with.
@Tim I agree on the physical/virtual mess, and I don't really see the advantage.
@Andrew I think has the most realistic idea for what advantage there would be.
In any case, I like the idea of making multiple physical servers act like one actual server more than this. I may just be too slow to grasp it. The Amazon version I can see-- but on one physical server, not so much.
Cheers to the comments..all good points.
I want to clarify a couple things:
Andrew, you nailed it on the head when you point out the advantages. We have encountered the demand for instant scaling time and time again with sites and Apps that get massive usage spikes and need to scale immediately or simply plan to grow and need a scalable solution from a non-dedicated box (in this case the Dedicated Virtual) to a Physical Dedicated that does not involve recreating a server instance by hand, which can be very time consuming.
The Nitro is not several virtual servers load balanced (although we can do that as well with the (dv)). The Nitro is One physical box that can be loadbalanced, or stacked with other nitro boxes to handle a very very large site/app-whathave-you.
If you have any more questions regarding this..feel free to email me @ jason@mediatemple.net or hit our sales dpt..they are quite in the know ;-)
Cheers!!
Jason Mcvearry
(mt) Media Temple
Richard... it would be good if you could post some info on what kind of hosting services other startups are using. What kind of changes have they made as they grew. This would definitely help budding startups in making decisions.
I'll look forward to one such detailed post with various startups considered.
Internet Evangelist, that's a great post idea - I've added it to my list. Thanks.