FreeBSD 8.1 and ZFS in the Cloud by CloudSigma

CloudSigma AG, European provider of cloud servers, announced the addition of FreeBSD and by extension ZFS to its cloud computing platform. A FreeBSD 8.1 pre-installed cloud server is now available for deployment from CloudSigma’s public drives library.

Patrick Baillie, CEO commented: "We’ve had many requests for FreeBSD over the last few months so I’m very happy to be able to offer its latest iteration directly from our drives library. We are continuing our strategy of keeping an open software layer and expanding the number of ready cloud server choices we offer over time."

FreeBSD has a number of key differentiating factors from competing Linux and Windows platforms and is not generally available for deployment from other leading cloud vendors. As with all cloud servers from CloudSigma, customers have full software level control and sole root access to their FreeBSD servers.

Advanced technology needs an advanced cloud
Customers of CloudSigma are able to create customised infrastructure with emphasis given to performance and control in a way not possible from other competing platforms. The ability to deploy FreeBSD and use ZFS is one example of the freedom available on CloudSigma’s platform.

ZFS is an ideal tool for use in clustered server environments where high availability is critical. Some of important characteristics are:

• pooled data storage across multiple servers and drives
• configurable data snapshots with time slider
• RAIDZ available with high integrity data writing

As a company CloudSigma does not subscribe to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy for delivering cloud computing services preferring to give its customers the tools and power to tune-in their cloud infrastructure; the result is higher performance, efficiency and security for customers.

Hybrid Web Cluster Choose CloudSigma with FreeBSD

Hybrid Web Cluster has chosen CloudSigma to from part of its multi-cloud next generation Platform-as-a-Service offering. Hybrid Web Cluster is a cloud web hosting platform with no single point of failure which delivers the benefits of redundancy and scalability to web agencies, developers and ISPs of all sizes.

Luke Marsden of Hybrid Web Cluster commented:" In order to deliver the kind of next generation web hosting platform that we have built, we needed a public cloud vendor that gave us the ability to choose our operating system and applications without restriction. The CloudSigma product was easily moulded to our needs without us having to change our approach or vision – a task not easily achieved with the large incumbent cloud vendors."

Hybrid Web Cluster leverages the advantages of FreeBSD and ZFS to deliver a web hosting solution that includes automatic load balancing, instant failover-recovery and auto-scaling.

Performance and Control
CloudSigma has concentrated on building a product that addresses two of the key concerns of many prospective cloud computing users, performance and control.

Luke Marsden continued:" CloudSigma offers full API control over cloud servers which allowed us to build the sort of integration we use implicitly in our platform offering – enabling automatic provision of entire clusters as well as automatic real-time cluster scaling to keep up with changes in demand. We had wondered how performance would stack up on cloud infrastructure but have been very impressed with the results so far. Our cloud servers have been exceeding our expectations, particularly with respect to storage which so often suffers in the cloud."

CloudSigma are offering a 14-day free trial (open to all) whilst Hybrid Web Cluster have beta testing slots available for suitable applicants (ISPs and web agencies looking for the manageability wins of complete failure-tolerance, automatic load balancing and auto-scaling).