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.
