Web hosting provider Dreamhost builds new public cloud
Dreamhost has built a public cloud service called DreamCompute that is built on OpenStack, the open cloud infrastructure. The new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) shows how a federated, universal cloud shows market promise to give customers a greater choice from open and proprietary offerings.
Dreamhost, a longstanding hosting provider, has over the past few years been active in OpenStack. Its participation falls in line with its development of an open source, next-generation storage service called Ceph that is compatible with offerings from the likes of Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ceph serves as a core aspect of DreamCompute as does Nicira’s network virtualization platform. Nicira is the network virtualization technology provider that VMware acquired this summer for $1.2 billion. Nicira is a core networking technology in OpenStack. DreamCompute also provides API compatibility with the OpenStack APIs, including Nova Compute, Quantum Networking, and Cinder for block storage.
- Dreamhost.
Web hosting provider DreamHost expanded its services Monday by announcing of a new public cloud hosting product, powered by OpenStack and known as DreamCompute, that the company says will compete with the major infrastructure-as-a-service offerings including Amazon EC2.
In the press release announcing its new cloud hosting service, DreamHost says DreamCompute is designed in both its pricing and to appeal to developers and entrepreneurs, a set of users that makes up a core component of the hosting company’s customer base.
While the release says DreamHost would “announce” the DreamCompute service Monday morning, it seems the cloud hosting product will start out in a beta testing phase, as the release says pricing for the service will be, “released publicly in the coming weeks,” and a form on the DreamCompute section of the company’s website invites users to sign up for a free beta trial of the
For the second time in as many months, DreamHost – a successful provider of more traditional hosting services in the shared, dedicated and virtual private server markets – has introduced a cloud hosting service built on open-source technology and designed to compete with Amazon’s market-dominating cloud products. In early September, DreamHost launched an object-based cloud storage service, DreamObjects, built on the open-source Ceph file system developed in-house by Sage Weil, one of DreamHost’s founders.
DreamObjects was also launched as a “beta,” following the Gmail model, a tactic that enabled the company to scale up quickly while still managing the initial load placed on the systems, DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson told the WHIR in an interview at the time.
Like DreamObjects, the new DreamCompute service uses Ceph, in this case to power its block storage component, as well as several other open-source components, most notably the OpenStack cloud platform. It also uses Nicira for network virtualization.
While OpenStack has quickly become one of the major open source projects, to date only a handful of service providers have brought cloud hosting products to market based on OpenStack. Rackspace, which contributed the original code to the OpenStack platform, only moved its Rackspace Cloud hosting service entirely onto the OpenStack platform in August.
DreamHost has been a notable supporter of the open-source community in general, and of OpenStack in particular. Last year, DreamHost announced that it was contributing the Ceph code to the OpenStack platform. Last Month, DreamHost said it had joined the OpenStack Foundation as a gold founding member, adding that CEO Anderson had joined the foundation’s board.
DreamHost says DreamCompute is highly scalable – with instances that can scale from 1GB to 64GB of RAM – quick to provision, resilient and secure, and works seamlessly with the existing DreamObjects cloud storage solution.