In 2013, XBT Holding S.A began the creation of Servers.com by first acquiring the domain name, and then developing Servers.com as a consolidated product offering. Nick Dvas, Project Manager for Servers.com, recently spoke with Linux.com about the company, what it offers, and how Linux and open source play a role in its operations.
Tell me about Servers.com — what led XBT to create it?
At XBT, we have enormous amount of experience in all areas of hosting technologies. We have over 20,000 servers in active lease by customers. We’ve built a top-class network with the capacity currently approaching 2 Tbps, and our Content Delivery Network (CDN) serves approximately 800 Gbps of content currently – and that keeps growing. By acquisitions, we’ve reached geographical diversity and expanded our reach to three continents. What XBT lacked was a single strong brand, capable of going beyond B2B sales into B2SMB and B2C markets. By consolidating the service offerings under a single offering, Servers.com lets customers select what they want.
What services does Servers.com offer? What will be added?
Currently, we have four services: Dedicated Servers, Cloud Servers, Cloud Storage, and Intelligent DNS.
Dedicated Servers are our core business, and will remain such. We offer best-of-breed Dell servers with top-notch CPUs, spice up this offer with our 40gbps connection available for each server, and with our Global Private Network. We’ve put enormous effort and labor into our Dedicated Servers infrastructure, and we succeeded in building a service for the most demanding professionals.
Our Cloud Servers are above an industry-standard level as well. On top of high-performance SSD instances, we offer private networking for Cloud Servers, and it is really private and secure — way more secure than what you can find with many other providers.
Cloud Storage offers triple redundancy of a stored data and has proved itself as a good solution both for backup storage and for website media content.
Finally, Intelligent DNS — the first in an upcoming line of our Intelligent products — is a DNS hosting service, capable of determining the health of servers behind DNS records and managing these records based on servers’ availability. For the customer it means that, if they have several servers, traffic will never be routed to a broken one.
We see more services coming this year — Monitoring, Databases, and Load Balancing are three I’d like to mention. Plus, our plans include further geographical expansion — we’re building a segment in Singapore, and we’ve recently completed an acquisition of a Russian company, so we’ll have a presence in Moscow.
How is the market for servers and cloud service changing? For example, what new types of service and capability are customers asking for?
Current structure of demand is dual. We see growing demand both in Dedicated Servers, and in Cloud. 2015 is definitely the year of IT security: companies started feeling the importance of investments in IT security. So, demand for private networking is huge.
Plus, we have more data, larger graphical formats, better bandwidth and computers at the customers’ side: so, we see more networking throughput, better CPUs, larger storage — well-expected demand pattern.
On top of that, being DevOps-friendly is a must. So, cool features like Intelligent DNS that I described before create additional value for customers and decrease their operational costs, relieving them from some headaches.
What kinds of companies look for multi-continent data centers and connectivity?
Obviously, companies with customers on both continents if we speak about web hosting. On the other side, we have customers from development industry and they have multiple remote offices / branch offices. In this case, fast and stable connection between locations on both sites is a must. Some developments studios maintain production as well, demanding a truly global infrastructure design in order to sustain development process, QA, and production. In this case, the proximity is a business critical requirement. You need to be where your customers are.
Another scenario is a global failover cluster, which can be the case for any kind of business demanding for business continuity.
Customers using Servers.com cloud, cloud server, and cloud storage services include e-commerce, gaming, finance, and development.
What kind of performance and reliability difference does “100% SSD Cloud” make? What kinds of companies and apps does this matter to most?
SSD has become a standard rather than a feature these days. I’d put the answer the other way: if you do not have SSD offering in your cloud, you’re behind the demand and behind the market. SSD has performance an order of magnitude better than magnetic drives. Magnetic drives in the cloud are becoming a truly niche solution, targeting those who need to have large amounts of content stored at a low price.
Why is open source so important to the company?
We chose open source – specifically OpenStack – as the platform for creating public and private clouds, because it can scale up for carrier-grade activity, because we can tune services for each customer’s needs, and because it integrates with other open and proprietary enterprise environments. For example, we needed to be able to integrate our bare-metal offerings with our cloud services.
And we had already been managing open-source systems like Linux and BSD that our customers were using, plus we had been actively using OpenStack components like Neutron for networking, and Swift for storage, and Nginx behind our CDN. We use BackOffice as the management system that provides fulfillment of servers and on top of the OpenStack cloud. Plus, we have made contributions to OpenStack.
The Raspbian developers have just updated their Linux distribution, and it’s now based on Debian 8 “Jessie,” the latest stable version available right now.
Raspbian is one of the oldest distros that were released for the Raspberry Pi platform and it continues to be one of the most used. There are, of course, quite a few other operating systems that run just fine on the Raspberry Pi, but since Raspbian is using Debian as a base, it’s also somewhat easier to use not to mention that it comes with a huge repository of packages.
The developers of the Git open-source distributed version control system have just announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Git 2.6.0 software for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.
According to the internal release notes attached at the end of the article for reference, Git 2.6 is a major release that introduces dozens of new features, but also fixes numerous bugs that have been reported by users since the previous version of the application.
Read more at Softpedia Linux News
Recently, I wrote a tutorial on Emby, a media server that allows users to stream their own media across devices. What attracted me to Emby was that it’s a fully open source project, compared to Plex which I heavily use. To learn more about the Emby project (formerly known as Media Browser), I reached out to Emby founder Luke Pulverenti. Here, he talks about choosing an open source development approach and about the Emby project’s goals for the future.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What do you do and where you live?
I live in New England, and as of earlier this year I work full-time on Emby. Before that I worked in the healthcare software industry and also for other startups.
When did you become interested in open source?
Before Emby, I had limited open source experience. I submitted small bug fixes here and there to different projects that I took an interest in. The Media Browser project was always fully open source, and with the re-branding to Emby we felt that was the best way for the project to continue moving forward.
What was the goal behind starting Emby?
Emby has been around since 2008, and was formerly known as Media Browser. Media Browser was a plugin for Windows Media Center and had a very distinct reputation. It did not have the feature set of other products such as Xbmc, but it had the best presentation around, and when you wanted to show off your setup, you did it with Media Browser.
I was just an ordinary Media Browser user, and when Windows 8 was released without Windows Media Center, the team had a decision to make. Either evolve or become irrelevant as Windows Media Center fades away. That’s when I approached ebr (who was then the main developer responsible for Media Browser) about re-inventing the product with a client-server architecture that would give us a platform to become a true media server solution for both local and remote content. So, this decision was based primarily on continuing the project we love and finding a way for it to continue to thrive.
Is Emby server fully open source? If yes, what license are you using and why did you choose it to make open source?
Emby Server is fully open source under GPL V2.0. Anyone can run from source and be up and running in a matter of minutes. It’s important to mention though that our goal is to produce the best experience we possibly can. If an agreement with a potential partner were to require us to make certain modules closed source, then we would not hesitate to do that. These situations are reserved for standalone, optional features and will not prevent running the core server from source.
Is Emby a company with full-time employees, or is it a part-time project that you manage?
Yes, Emby is an LLC, and there is a very small number of us working full-time. The project has grown to the point where it needs full-time attention in order to be able to support users and be competitive with other products.
What infrastructure do you use for publishing the source code and what infrastructure are you using to offer compiled binaries?
Our source code is on GitHub, along with documented build scripts for Windows and Linux. Several of the Linux packages are using the Open Build Service, while others are maintained by volunteering community members. We are currently working on getting packages released for QNAP, Synology, and other NAS devices.
I found it strange that Emby is not available for openSUSE, what’s the reason?
We’d like to be on every distribution that we possibly can. It is only a matter of time and resources. In the meantime, until there is a dedicated openSUSE package, the Docker installation is a great alternative.
The Emby Connect service is similar to Plex Pass. What are the additional features users can get?
Emby Connect is a completely free service that makes it easy to sign into your apps when away from home and manage connections to multiple servers.
Normally, signing into a server requires three pieces of information — the server IP address, along with a username and password. With Emby Connect, you no longer need to know a server’s IP address in order to connect.
How do you fund the development?
We have subscription services that we call the Emby Supporter membership. We use these for bonus features that we think users will find value in purchasing. They help fund the project and allow us to compete with other products.
What’s your long-term goal with Emby? Where do you want to see it?
Our goal is to continue to evolve with the industry and become the best way to consume and manage personal media. As new technologies emerge, we want our users to be confident that we’re going to be there bringing them the integration they’re looking for. In 2015, cloud services and storage have become more affordable for mainstream users. In 2016, I expect they’re going to really begin affecting the way we use apps on a daily basis, and Emby will be there to help you take advantage of it. Conversely, as client devices continue to become more powerful, so too will the in-app experiences.
ODPi, a nonprofit organization accelerating the delivery of Big Data solutions by powering a well-defined platform called ODPi Core, today announced new members, technical milestones, its formal governance structure and that it will be hosted at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project.
The explosion of data and the requirements to store and process information has resulted in a variety of Big Data solutions. ODPi brings industry leaders together to accelerate the adoption of Apache Hadoop and related Big Data technologies and make it easier to rapidly develop applications. This will be done through integration and standardization of a common reference platform that enables users to realize business results more quickly.
Read more at Linux Foundation
