Most of you are familiar with Steve and I through our work as consultants in Serbia where we have mastered the art of “Combat Consultancy”, which is consultancy in high pressure, hostile and just downright difficult business environments.
It may surprise some of you to know that we are also both senior executives at DNS Europe, where Steve is the Communications Director and Jonathan the Technical and Operations Director.
Over the last few months DNS Europe has been working with our US partners 3tera and EUnet to introduce affordable Grid Computing to the UK in the form of our Grid Hosting services based on 3tera’s superb AppLogic.
It essentially means that for less than the price of mid-range dedicated server, small and medium sized companies can now enter the cloud computing game with their own AppLogic powered Virtual Data Center based in London (or Belgrade)
In addition to Virtual Data Centers, we are also slowly releasing a series of Cloud based virtual servers (Virtual Grid Servers) which are based on CentOS 5 Linux but to which you can add “modules” which range from Control Panels (like DirectAdmin) through to fully pre-packaged & ready to run Open Source applications and services like SugarCRM, PBX in a Flash (an Asterisk based VoIP PBX) and Zimbra Mail.
The idea is that customers can add and combine as many of these modules as they like to their Virtual Grid Server, they just pay for the resources that they use (drive space, CPU, bandwidth and memory).
Customers can get an entire business infrastructure (mail, CRM, Telephony, website) with their VGS, which is an ultra safe and stable platform that shrinks or grows to fit their real-world needs. This means their IT infrastructure investments are recession and growth proof, pegged to the real state of their business (i.e. what they need now). This really is Utility Computing, where like electricity or gas, customers only pay for what they use.
For an overview of what Grid Hosting is and its benefits, this is a good start: http://www.dnseurope.net/gridhosting/
We are absolutely convinced that virtualization breakthroughs like Cloud Computing and Grid Hosting are the wave of the future for business hosting and web applications. There is a huge and growing interest in this as more and more CTOs wake up to the power and potential of this technology.
If you or anyone you know is interested in Grid Hosting, just give is a call or shoot us a mail via our contact form. These are early days, but this is the perfect time to look into this: The technology is proven and stable, but the prices are still low to entice early adopters. It will all change within a few months.
Incidentally, this service is also a triumph for our long campaign for Serbia as an outsourcing location. We at DNS Europe are able to match the prices of US rivals and bring affordable Cloud Computing and Grid Hosting to the UK and Europe by outsourcing Research & Development and parts of our advanced technical support to Serbia, where we maintain an office and brilliant team of local experts.
For more information see the DNS Europe website and our recent press release.
Serbian and other South Eastern European readers may be shocked and delighted to note that EUnet is also offering Grid Hosting in the region.
