FreeBSD 8.1 and ZFS launched for cloud servers

CloudSigma launches FreeBSD 8.1 and ZFS in the Cloud

Zürich, Wednesday 27 October 2010 CloudSigma AG, a leading European provider of cloud servers, is delighted to announce the addition of FreeBSD and by extension ZFS to its cloud computing platform. A FreeBSD 8.1 pre-installed cloud server is now available for instant deployment from CloudSigma’s public drives library.

Patrick Baillie, CEO commented ‘We’ve had many requests for FreeBSD over the last few months so I’m very happy to be able to offer its latest iteration directly from our drives library. We are continuing our strategy of keeping an open software layer and expanding the number of ready cloud server choices we offer over time.’

FreeBSD has a number of key differentiating factors from competing Linux and Windows platforms and is not generally available for deployment from other leading cloud vendors. As with all cloud servers from CloudSigma, customers have full software level control and sole root access to their FreeBSD servers.

Advanced technology needs an advanced cloud

Customers of CloudSigma are able to create customised infrastructure with emphasis given to performance and control in a way not possible from other competing platforms. The ability to deploy FreeBSD and use ZFS is just one example of the freedom available on CloudSigma’s platform.

ZFS is an ideal tool for use in clustered server environments where high availability is critical. Some of important characteristics are:

  • pooled data storage across multiple servers and drives
  • configurable data snapshots with time slider
  • RAIDZ available with high integrity data writing

As a company CloudSigma does not subscribe to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy for delivering cloud computing services preferring to give its customers the tools and power to tune-in their cloud infrastructure; the result is higher performance, greater efficiency and greater security for customers.

Hybrid Web Cluster Choose CloudSigma with FreeBSD

Hybrid Web Cluster has chosen CloudSigma to from part of its multi-cloud next generation Platform-as-a-Service offering. Hybrid Web Cluster is a cloud web hosting platform with no single point of failure which delivers the benefits of redundancy and scalability to web agencies, developers and ISPs of all sizes.

Luke Marsden of Hybrid Web Cluster commented ‘In order to deliver the kind of next generation web hosting platform that we have built, we needed a public cloud vendor that gave us the ability to choose our operating system and applications without restriction. The CloudSigma product was easily moulded to our needs without us having to change our approach or vision – a task not easily achieved with the large incumbent cloud vendors.’

Hybrid Web Cluster leverages the advantages of FreeBSD and ZFS to deliver a web hosting solution that includes automatic load balancing, instant failover-recovery and auto-scaling.

Performance and Control

CloudSigma has concentrated on building a product that addresses two of the key concerns of many prospective cloud computing users, performance and control.

Luke Marsden continued, ‘CloudSigma offers full API control over cloud servers which allowed us to build the sort of integration we use implicitly in our platform offering – enabling automatic provision of entire clusters as well as automatic real-time cluster scaling to keep up with changes in demand. We had wondered how performance would stack up on cloud infrastructure but have been very impressed with the results so far. Our cloud servers have been exceeding our expectations, particularly with respect to storage which so often suffers in the cloud’.

CloudSigma are offering a 14-day free trial (open to all) whilst Hybrid Web Cluster have beta testing slots available for suitable applicants (ISPs and web agencies looking for the manageability wins of complete failure-tolerance, automatic load balancing and auto-scaling). Further details are available from their respective websites.

For more information

Hybrid Web Cluster website: http://www.hybrid-cluster.com
Hybrid Web Cluster Beta Programme: http://www.hybrid-cluster.com/
CloudSigma Twitter: Follow us here.
CloudSigma on Facebook: Join the conversation!

About Hybrid Web Cluster

Hybrid Web Cluster is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software product developed by Hybrid Logic Ltd, a company based in London, United Kingdom. The software provides commodity LAMP web hosting in a distributed and fault-tolerant manner across a cluster of servers. You can run a web cluster across multiple physical locations, using a mix of virtualised cloud infrastructure and physical hardware to build a true Hybrid Cloud.

Hybrid Web Cluster is highly scalable, allowing your cluster to dynamically change its size in response to real-time information about the demand it is receiving. It automatically load-balances sites between servers in order to guarantee that all sites always respond quickly, and its redundancy guarantees ensure that even if you pull the power cable out, or disconnect an entire data centre from the Internet, your websites will stay online.

An intuitive and powerful web hosting control panel is offered with the cluster, providing full white-label and internationalization support, as well as an advanced reseller and affiliate system with a great deal of flexibility on customer billing and accounting. Hybrid Web Cluster frees you to sell easy-to-use commodity web hosting whilst taking full advantage of the enterprise-level redundancy and scalability promises of the cloud.

About CloudSigma AG
CloudSigma AG, based in Zürich, Switzerland provides a pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform offering high security, flexible cloud servers. Our innovative web console as well as API are designed to make cloud computing and cloud hosting straightforward. High availability redundant infrastructure is backed up by a generous Service Level Agreement that covers not only availability but also performance.

CloudSigma’s unique approach extends completely open software and networking layers to customers allowing them to run any operating system and applications they chose and to implement their own customised networking policies. CloudSigma bills by each raw resource (CPU, RAM, storage etc.) individually in a transparent, unbundled manner.

Share this Post

2429cfa8d64e98b5aa12da5bc42ec19a?s=80&r=g

About Robert Jenkin

Robert is a Co-Founder and CEO of CloudSigma along with his long-time friend Patrick Baillie. Robert & Patrick had a vision for a different style of cloud focused around customer requirements not computing frameworks created by the service provider; an open environment where end-users could define their infrastructure in a highly flexible way with little or no restrictions, just like they were used to doing in their own private environments. Their shared vision was the genesis of CloudSigma in 2009 in Zürich, Switzerland and as with many great things, it began life sketched out on a napkin! Robert previously has experience in early stage venture capital and corporate finance in the City of London. Robert is a graduate in Economics from Cambridge University.