The Planet Server Cloud is now available.

It’s refreshing to be able to say that.

Our team has been working for months to build a production-ready cloud server product. We’ve conducted extensive surveys with our customers about the features that are most important to them, and accordingly, we’ve spared no expense in developing a platform that’s purpose-built for web-based businesses.

The industry is rife with cloud services hindered by inconsistency and a lack of redundancy. By contrast, our customers count on us for high availability, rapid provisioning, seamless scalability and generous bandwidth, so took an entirely new approach. The most obvious differentiators are the hardware devices that support the platform: Sun storage area networks, Intel Nehalem processors, a Cisco- and Juniper-powered network, and Dell servers running KVM – Kernel-based Virtual Machine.

With the feedback we received from our customers and beta testers, Server Cloud now features:

Dedicated Resources

Each Server Cloud instance includes completely dedicated CPU, RAM, storage and network capacity. This ensures your Server Cloud performance will never be negatively affected by another customer’s resource usage.

Redundant Storage

Server Cloud disks are powered by a high-performance, high-availability storage area network (SAN). Many cloud/VPS solutions operate on local disks from the host system, which means any compute or storage failure can result in downtime and potential data loss. By contrast, at The Planet your Server Cloud provides higher availability since computing and storage resources are separate, independent and redundant. In the event of a complete host server failure, your Server Cloud data is always protected.

Rapid Provisioning

Once your order has been placed and verified, provisioning is completely automated. Your server can be ready for login in as little as five minutes.

Cutting-Edge Technology

Server Cloud is built on the KVM virtualization platform, directly integrated into the mainline Linux kernel. It offers multiple benefits compared with legacy virtualization technologies like Xen:

• Primary platform for the open-source development community: Backed by the Linux Foundation and the top Linux distributions, including Red Hat and Canonical, KVM is the platform of choice and the future for Linux-based virtualization.
• High-performance, feature-rich platform: KVM supports the latest in virtualization technologies, including live migration, RAM de-duplication, para-virtualized storage and network capabilities, coupled with stellar performance and efficiency.
• Interoperable and portable to physical servers: No operating system guest modifications are required by KVM, which makes it the ideal platform for a truly portable hybrid hosting infrastructure.
• More up-to-date technologies: As part of the mainline kernel, KVM offers direct access to all Linux updates and security patches as they are released.

Seamless Upgrades

Need some more RAM? Want to add a CPU? Because your data is hosted outside the host server, once you decide on an upgrade, all we do is reboot your instance with the new resource allocations. If there isn’t enough available on your current host server, you’ll be automatically moved to another host server with capacity … in the same amount of time.

I could probably talk your ear off about why we designed the product this way or that way, but I’ll save some of that content for a follow-up post. All you need to know now is that The Planet Server Cloud is amazing, and you can take advantage of it right now.

-Carl