Parallels unclassified Cloud Server

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



Creating Parallels Cloud Server, we went from the needs of small hosters. The experience of Parallels Plesk Panel suggested that 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 equipment failures, simplifies server support and administration, and allows you to create efficient and highly available virtual servers with very good uptime.

Drawing

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



The second stage was working 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 ranged 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 solution architecture 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.



At the summit, the key features of Parallels Cloud Server became clear. With PCS, small hosting companies can deploy flexible and scalable storage on the existing hardware and increase the use of server hard drives, which are now used by a little more than a third. At the same time, the distributed storage system provides the performance that is as close as possible for local HDD / SSD. Hot-swappable disks are supported; they are automatically “sucked up” into the cloud, which is then automatically balanced again. PCS can automatically detect failed nodes, and the user can set an arbitrary level of redundancy. Another good news is that Parallels Cloud Storage will stand out from Parallels Cloud Server to work with others,

How much is?

A little about prices, especially since they were asked about this in the comments on the first post . PCS is available on a leasing basis. Let's see how much deductions are required to pay Parallels monthly. Take hosting, for example, 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 realize the minimum redundancy of data storage in PCS.

Deductions for two servers will look as follows. Creation of 150-200 containers - $ 200 per month. Distributed storage with a total volume of 4 TB - $ 306 per month. Software Rebootless addon on 2 servers - $ 20 per month. Total - $ 526.

If something is left overs, ask questions, I will answer them.