Entic.net: On The Cloud

We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We would still like to continue to provide Solaris zones. We like them. We believe they provide the fastest virtualization technique available (as you know, zones don't use a hypervisor unlike VMware or Xen products). Plus, we believe Solaris has a really good IP stack. Both combined, provide a super duper server that you get to benefit from.

So, how can we improve on what we are doing? Well, we want to be able to provide the zones in a cloud environment. Where, you can easily migrate the zone from one server to another using our web portal. This is not true today, because we have several servers and most of the servers are at different patch levels. This creates a problem for zone migrations (in addition, not all the servers are at a patch level where we can do zone upgrades when attached).

Another big issue is that the zones themselves don't have a full IP stack. This means that you can't have your own firewall inside your zone. This can be a really good feature, especially since VMware and Xen based products offer this.

Our next roll out of new servers and features will solve all of that. We will be going with OpenSolaris. We feel the OpenSolaris is matured and stable enough that we can proceed with that. It solves all of the above problems with the ipkg-native zone brand, and the Crossbow project that has already been integrated into OpenSolaris.

We'll also offer some new desktop "virtualization" in the near future. We hope this along with the new offerings of the zones based on OpenSolaris, we'll be in a better shape then most other competitors. Oh, and the new servers with SSD caches will help quite a bit too.