The Planet Opts for Dell R710 Servers

Houston-based hosting firm The Planet has announced a new service called the Server Cloud, which depends on standard Dell servers for fast provisioning.There's really no standard cloud server. (In fact, for the customers, the idea is to not know or care about the hardware.) But The Planet has taken a step in that direction by basing its new Server Cloud rental service around the rack-mounted Dell PowerEdge R710 server with quad-core Intel Xeon E5520 processors. The 2U machine has a starting price of about $2,000.

Carl Meadows, product marketing manager at The Planet, explained that the idea was to have a standard offering that could be provisioned within minutes for customers running Web sites 24/7. Cloud offerings based on hourly billing do not fit such customers, he said. Prices for the new service, he said, start at $49 per month for a half gigabyte of memory and 60 gigabytes of storage on an Sun SAN system. The customers would get dedicated CPU power of about half a core.

To make prices more transparent, each user gets bandwidth of one terabyte, which is more than most need, he added. Customers on many cloud services end up paying three times more for bandwidth fees than they pay for CPU fees, he added.

With such low prices The Cloud was not able to afford a commercial hipervizor, and so uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) Hypervisor, which Meadows said is popular in the open source world. Reportedly, it does not require modifications to the operating system, which eases development and makes patching faster.

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