Gandi.net, french registrar launches in granular server resources.
Gandi.net, a French domain registrar has always done what makes sense in a technical way.
Starting with ’sec’ registration of domains. Then came dns, blogs, email service, mostly free with the purchase of a domain and of reasonable (or good) quality. They’re definitely not a discounter.
As of the 7th of January they launched their Gandi hosting project in public beta.
The offer
Gandi hosting is a VPS (xen) with dynamic resource allocation (both up and down).
You can rent a number of slices (1,2,4, up to 8 during the beta period), each representing a 1/64th of a quad-dualcore opteron with 16GB ram and 320GB raid6 disk space, with 100Mbit/s flat rate bandwidth. Those slices are combined in your virtual machine(s).
One slice is therefore equivalent to 1/8th of a modern opteron, 256MB ram and 1.5Mbit/s. After the beta period the 8/64th limitation will be removed and the full beast made available.
Disk space can also be purchased separately at 0.1EUR per month per GB. All disk space is permanent storage.
Resource allocation is done in the control panel on the website, after which your system will have it’s extra virtual hardware attached within minutes and on the fly.
Automatic allocation, dynamically scaling your server up and down according to it’s needs, should be available in early 2008.
Apparently, slices can be rented for periods of one month at the time. The author of this article believes day-to-day or by the hour allocation will be possible someday.
The virtual servers are spread out over 4 datacenters, and can move to a different DC when trouble arrises. Think of it as a raid6 of datacenters.
A plethora of pre-packaged servers exists in the form of the ‘AI’ offering. These give you a ready-to-go web, db, mail or gameserver. New AI’s can be requested and voted upon.
The OS’s of choice are Mandriva08, Ubuntu 7.10 CentOS 5, Fedora Core 7 or Debian 4, although already FreeBSD and Opensolaris are being voted up as new features.
The naked operating systems (without AI) are also available. All systems are preconfigured (or so it seems) to automatically attach/mount/use the allocated resources.
Pricing
The pricing is also in beta, presently at 6EUR per share per month (a little under 9USD). If the domain pricing is anything to go on, the prices will be digressive in higher quantities, the present beta price could be the bottom level and the top price could be double that.
Comparing non-final pricing during a beta period would be flawed, full stop.
Comparing to Amazon EC2
It’s tempting to compare this offer to that of the other on-demand computing vendor, Amazon EC2, but they are playing in a different game.
The main advantage of Gandi’s services seems to be the resources are scalable on the fly.
The main advantage of EC2 is the resources can be purchased per hour, where Gandi’s are presently per month.
The main differences would be:
- At Gandi, the storage and machines are permanent, and the storage is private per server (no public interface, it’s “just” a disk)
- Gandi is located in Europe so all US-bound bandwidth is transatlantic.
- It’s not foreseen to start multiple copies of the same machine like EC2’s AMIs.
An Amazon small instance would be roughly equivalent to 8 slices, a large instance to 32 slices and an XL to all 64ths of a machine.
Pricing seems to be very competitive to EC2, with respect to the differences in the products’ nature.
Gandi hosting seems to be geared towards permanent running without initial scaling worries and costs (startups rejoice!), something EC2+S3 has been criticized on for being too expensive for.
EC2 presently seems to be best for sporadic runs requiring very high computing power.
Notes
The website is available in English, but sometimes it’s French roots are showing.
Yours truly will try to pry out technical data on how they manage this, as a follow-up to this glorified press release.
Also, I have no affiliation with Gandi other than being a satisfied customer.
I have a purchased a live test machine available for further tests and info.
