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58-467: Rackspace Cloud announced Mosso LLC in March, 2006, as a wholly owned subsidiary billed as a utility computing offering. Mosso offered PaaS web hosting on LAMP and IIS infrastructure. As it pre-dated mainstream adoption of the term cloud computing , it was "retooled" and relaunched on February 19, 2008, adopting the tagline "Mosso: The Hosting Cloud". The "Mosso" branding (including the mosso.com domain)

116-483: A BSD license (and continues to maintain) PV drivers for Windows. Third-party developers have built a number of tools (known as Xen Management Consoles) to facilitate the common tasks of administering a Xen host, such as configuring, starting, monitoring and stopping of Xen guests. Examples include: The Xen hypervisor is covered by the GNU General Public Licence, so all of these versions contain

174-703: A competitive enterprise product. To support embedded systems such as smartphone/ IoT with relatively scarce hardware computing resources, the Secure Xen ARM architecture on an ARM CPU was exhibited at Xen Summit on April 17, 2007, held in IBM TJ Watson. The first public release of Secure Xen ARM source code was made at Xen Summit on June 24, 2008 by Sang-bum Suh , a Cambridge alumnus, in Samsung Electronics. On October 22, 2007, Citrix Systems completed its acquisition of XenSource, and

232-569: A computing power plant, incorporating multiple utilities to form a software stack. Services such as "IP billing-on-tap" were marketed. HP introduced the Utility Data Center in 2001. Sun announced the Sun Cloud service to consumers in 2000. In December 2005, Alexa launched Alexa Web Search Platform, a Web search building tool for which the underlying power is utility computing. Alexa charges users for storage, utilization, etc. There

290-499: A later date. Xen can scale to 4095 physical CPUs, 256 VCPUs per HVM guest, 512 VCPUs per PV guest, 16 TB of RAM per host, and up to 1 TB of RAM per HVM guest or 512 GB of RAM per PV guest. The Xen hypervisor has been ported to a number of processor families: Xen can be shipped in a dedicated virtualization platform, such as XCP-ng or XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor, and before that Citrix XenServer, and before that XenSource's XenEnterprise). Alternatively, Xen

348-439: A local drive within supported operating systems ( Linux , Mac OS X , and Windows ). Redundancy is achieved by replicating three full copies of data across multiple computers in multiple "zones" within the same data center, where "zones" are physically (though not geographically) separate and supplied separate power and Internet services. Uploaded files can be distributed via Akamai Technologies to "hundreds of endpoints across

406-590: A private beta release on May 5, 2008, and is similar to Amazon Simple Storage Service . Unlimited files of up to 5 GB can be uploaded, managed via the online control panel or RESTful API and optionally served out via Akamai Technologies ' content delivery network . In addition to the online control panel, the service can be accessed over a RESTful API with open source client code available in C# / .NET , Python , PHP , Java , and Ruby . Jungle Disk , previously also owned by Rackspace, allows Cloud Files to be mounted as

464-592: A real-time cloud server and application monitoring service, Xeround , a MySQL cloud database, and MongoLab , the cloud version of the popular NoSQL database MongoDB . The Cloud Servers API launched on July 14, 2009, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license allows clients to create, configure and control virtual servers. In addition to issuing basic management commands this "enables elastic scenarios" whereby servers are instantiated and destroyed in response to fluctuating load (one of

522-460: A special hypercall ABI , instead of certain architectural features. Through paravirtualization, Xen can achieve high performance even on its host architecture (x86) which has a reputation for non-cooperation with traditional virtualization techniques. Xen can run paravirtualized guests ("PV guests" in Xen terminology) even on CPUs without any explicit support for virtualization. Paravirtualization avoids

580-478: A total of $ 73.36 per month. Rackspace is quietly phasing out its older, less expensive products in transition to a managed platform where mandatory support charges are incorporated into the cost of the services. Cloud Tools are applications and infrastructure software built to run on the RackSpace cloud. Applications listed include Zend , a PHP stack, Cloudkick , a cloud performance testing services, CopperEgg ,

638-664: Is a free and open-source type-1 hypervisor , providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and is now being developed by the Linux Foundation with support from Intel , Citrix , Arm Ltd , Huawei , AWS , Alibaba Cloud , AMD , Bitdefender and EPAM Systems . The Xen Project community develops and maintains Xen Project as free and open-source software , subject to

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696-616: Is also home to the billing and reporting functions and provides access to support materials including developer resources, a knowledge base, forums and live chat. In 2010, RackSpace contributed the source code of its Cloud Files product to the OpenStack project under the Apache License to become the OpenStack Object Storage component. In April 2012, Rackspace announced it would implement OpenStack Compute as

754-631: Is also not possible to set up multiple top level domains to point to the same web root directory. The .NET environment dropped support for "full trust" in favour of "modified medium trust" despite having previously announced on their blog that they had been able to work directly with Microsoft to engineer a system that could accommodate Full Trust without compromising the security, scalability, and performance of other users. Cloud servers and most other cloud products are physically located in any of six data centers: Chicago , Northern Virginia , Dallas , London , Sydney , or Hong Kong . A separate "UK" account

812-498: Is billed on a utility computing basis. It allows an "unlimited" number of sites, databases and email accounts and includes reseller options such as client billing and support. Touted as "the fastest way to put sites on the cloud", it runs Windows or Linux applications across "hundreds of servers". Cloud Sites supports the PHP 5 , Perl , Python , MySQL , .NET 2.0+, ASP and Microsoft SQL Server 2014 application frameworks. In 2016,

870-494: Is distributed as an optional configuration of many standard operating systems. Xen is available for and distributed with: Guest systems can run fully virtualized (which requires hardware support), paravirtualized (which requires a modified guest operating system), or fully virtualized with paravirtualized drivers (PVHVM ). Most operating systems which can run on PCs can run as a Xen HVM guest. The following systems can operate as paravirtualized Xen guests: Xen version 3.0 introduced

928-536: Is for a central server to dispense tasks to participating nodes, on the behest of approved end-users (in the commercial case, the paying customers). Another model, sometimes called the virtual organization (VO), is more decentralized, with organizations buying and selling computing resources as needed or as they go idle. The definition of "utility computing" is sometimes extended to specialized tasks, such as web services . Utility computing merely means "Pay and Use", with regards to computing power. Utility computing

986-465: Is known as distributed computing . The term " grid computing " is often used to describe a particular form of distributed computing, where the supporting nodes are geographically distributed or cross administrative domains . To provide utility computing services, a company can "bundle" the resources of members of the public for sale, who might be paid with a portion of the revenue from clients. One model, common among volunteer computing applications,

1044-430: Is known as hardware-assisted virtualization , however, in Xen this is known as hardware virtual machine (HVM). HVM extensions provide additional execution modes, with an explicit distinction between the most-privileged modes used by the hypervisor with access to the real hardware (called "root mode" in x86) and the less-privileged modes used by guest kernels and applications with "hardware" accesses under complete control of

1102-662: Is mostly used for booting. Administrators can "live migrate" Xen virtual machines between physical hosts across a LAN without loss of availability. During this procedure, the LAN iteratively copies the memory of the virtual machine to the destination without stopping its execution. The process requires a stoppage of around 60–300 ms to perform final synchronization before the virtual machine begins executing at its final destination, providing an illusion of seamless migration. Similar technology can serve to suspend running virtual machines to disk, "freezing" their running state for resumption at

1160-544: Is no native operating system support for the Cloud Files API so it is not yet possible to "map" or "mount" it as a virtual drive without third-party software like JungleDisk that translates to a supported standard such as WebDAV . There are no concepts of "appending" or "locking" data within Cloud Files (which may affect some disk mirroring or backup solutions), nor support for permissions or transcoding. Data

1218-431: Is not a new concept, but rather has quite a long history. Among the earliest references is: If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry. IBM and other mainframe providers conducted this kind of business in

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1276-1003: Is organised into "containers" but it is not possible to create nested folders without a translation layer. Cloud Servers is a cloud infrastructure service that allows users to deploy "one to hundreds of cloud servers instantly" and create "advanced, high availability architectures" similar to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud . The "cloud servers" are virtual machines running on the Xen hypervisor for Linux-based instances, and Citrix XenServer for Windows and Linux instances. Each quad core hardware node has between 16 and 32 GB of RAM , allowing for allocations between 256 MB and 30 GB. Disk and CPU allocations scale up with memory, with disk sizes ranging from 10 GB to 620 GB. Various distributions of Linux are supported, including Arch , CentOS , Debian , Fedora , Gentoo , Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu . The technology behind

1334-678: Is required to access the London-based cloud products, however a single "US" Rackspace cloud account can access all US data centers along with the Sydney and Hong Kong regions. Cloud Sites are available in the Dallas and Chicago data centers only. The online control panel was custom built by and for the Rackspace Cloud service (as opposed to using control panel software like cPanel ). The control panel includes management interfaces for

1392-753: Is space in the market for specific industries and applications as well as other niche applications powered by utility computing. For example, PolyServe Inc. offers a clustered file system based on commodity server and storage hardware that creates highly available utility computing environments for mission-critical applications including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, as well as workload optimized solutions specifically tuned for bulk storage, high-performance computing, vertical industries such as financial services, seismic processing, and content serving. The Database Utility and File Serving Utility enable IT organizations to independently add servers or storage as needed, retask workloads to different hardware, and maintain

1450-473: The QEMU project to provide I/O virtualization to the virtual machines. The system emulates hardware via a patched QEMU "device manager" (qemu-dm) daemon running as a backend in dom0. This means that the virtualized machines see an emulated version of a fairly basic PC. In a performance-critical environment, PV-on-HVM disk and network drivers are used during the normal guest operation, so that the emulated PC hardware

1508-444: The "Rackspace Cloud" brand merged with Rackspace.com. In 2012, Rackspace rebranded as "Rackspace, the open cloud company". In 2014, Rackspace rebranded as "Rackspace, the #1 managed cloud company". Cloud files is a cloud hosting service that provides "unlimited online storage and CDN " for media (examples given include backups, video files, user content) on a utility computing basis. It was originally launched as Mosso CloudFS as

1566-778: The Cloud Sites division was sold to Liquid Web LLC. The service includes up to 10,000 "compute cycles" per month which "is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time" (with additional cycles priced at $ 0.01). This non-standard unit of measurement primarily reflects CPU processing time but also includes I/O operations so pages with many database queries will consume more "compute cycles". It can however be difficult to compare services between providers without standard units of measurement. Cloud Sites does not support Java , Tomcat , ColdFusion , SSH , RDP , API access, Microsoft Exchange or custom server-side components at this time. It

1624-501: The Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers and Cloud Files services. There was once a web based file manager, but this was removed for undisclosed reasons. It also allows users to manage multiple clients and the plans and products (e.g. databases, 24 x 7 support) that apply to them, with white label branding options for messaging. The clients themselves have access to a restricted version of the control panel that allows them to conduct administrative tasks such as managing mail accounts. The control panel

1682-735: The First Generation Cloud Servers and the Standard Next Generation Cloud Servers on its main Cloud Servers product page, opting to only disclose the Next Generation Performance 1 and Performance 2 products that require a minimum US$ 50 per month service charge per account for support service. The First Generation and Standard Next Generation platforms are now referred to as "Legacy Infrastructure" buried in

1740-468: The Xen hypervisor . Citrix also used the Xen brand itself for some proprietary products unrelated to Xen, including XenApp and XenDesktop . On April 15, 2013, it was announced that the Xen Project was moved under the auspices of the Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project. The Linux Foundation launched a new trademark for "Xen Project" to differentiate the project from any commercial use of

1798-537: The Xen Project moved to the xen.org domain. This move had started some time previously, and made public the existence of the Xen Project Advisory Board (Xen AB), which had members from Citrix , IBM , Intel , Hewlett-Packard , Novell , Red Hat , Sun Microsystems and Oracle . The Xen Advisory Board advises the Xen Project leader and is responsible for the Xen trademark, which Citrix has freely licensed to all vendors and projects that implement

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1856-403: The amount of storage or computing power available is considerably larger than that of a single time-sharing computer. Multiple servers are used on the "back end" to make this possible. These might be a dedicated computer cluster specifically built for the purpose of being rented out, or even an under-utilized supercomputer . The technique of running a single calculation on multiple computers

1914-493: The architecture, payment and development challenges of the new computing model. Google, Amazon and others started to take the lead in 2008, as they established their own utility services for computing, storage and applications. Utility computing can support grid computing which has the characteristic of very large computations or sudden peaks in demand which are supported via a large number of computers. "Utility computing" has usually envisioned some form of virtualization so that

1972-411: The avoidance of downtime. Virtualization also has benefits when working on development (including the development of operating systems): running the new system as a guest avoids the need to reboot the physical computer whenever a bug occurs. Sandboxed guest systems can also help in computer-security research, allowing study of the effects of some virus or worm without the possibility of compromising

2030-559: The capability to run Microsoft Windows as a guest operating system unmodified if the host machine's processor supports hardware virtualization provided by Intel VT-x (formerly codenamed Vanderpool) or AMD-V (formerly codenamed Pacifica). During the development of Xen 1.x, Microsoft Research , along with the University of Cambridge Operating System group, developed a port of Windows XP to Xen — made possible by Microsoft 's Academic Licensing Program. The terms of this license do not allow

2088-544: The customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing (such as grid computing), the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs. Utility is the packaging of system resources , such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service. This model has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire computer resources; instead, resources are essentially rented. This repackaging of computing services became

2146-689: The environment without disruption. In spring 2006 3tera announced its AppLogic service and later that summer Amazon launched Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). These services allow the operation of general purpose computing applications. Both are based on Xen virtualization software and the most commonly used operating system on the virtual computers is Linux, though Windows and Solaris are supported. Common uses include web application, SaaS, image rendering and processing but also general-purpose business applications. Decision support and business intelligence 8th edition page 680 ISBN   0-13-198660-0 Xen Xen (pronounced / ˈ z ɛ n / )

2204-461: The following two decades, often referred to as time-sharing, offering computing power and database storage to banks and other large organizations from their worldwide data centers. To facilitate this business model, mainframe operating systems evolved to include process control facilities, security, and user metering. The advent of mini computers changed this business model, by making computers affordable to almost all companies. As Intel and AMD increased

2262-477: The foundation of the shift to " on demand " computing, software as a service and cloud computing models that further propagated the idea of computing, application and network as a service. There was some initial skepticism about such a significant shift. However, the new model of computing caught on and eventually became mainstream. IBM, HP and Microsoft were early leaders in the new field of utility computing, with their business units and researchers working on

2320-501: The host domain (dom0). Xen originated as a research project at the University of Cambridge led by Ian Pratt , a senior lecturer in the Computer Laboratory , and his PhD student Keir Fraser. The first public release of Xen was made in 2003, with v1.0 following in 2004. Soon after, Pratt and Fraser along with other Cambridge alumni including Simon Crosby and founding CEO Nick Gault created XenSource Inc. to turn Xen into

2378-414: The host processor supports x86 virtualization , e.g., Intel VT-x and AMD-V ), or paravirtualized operating systems whereby the operating system is aware that it is running inside a virtual machine, and so makes hypercalls directly, rather than issuing privileged instructions. Xen Project boots from a bootloader such as GNU GRUB , and then usually loads a paravirtualized host operating system into

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2436-439: The host system. Finally, hardware appliance vendors may decide to ship their appliance running several guest systems, so as to be able to execute various pieces of software that require different operating systems. Xen offers five approaches to running the guest operating system: Xen provides a form of virtualization known as paravirtualization, in which guests run a modified operating system. The guests are modified to use

2494-409: The hypervisor (in x86, known as "non-root mode"; both root and non-root mode have Rings 0–3). Both Intel and AMD have contributed modifications to Xen to exploit their respective Intel VT-x and AMD-V architecture extensions. Use of ARM v7A and v8A virtualization extensions came with Xen 4.3. HVM extensions also often offer new instructions to allow direct calls by a paravirtualized guest/driver into

2552-560: The hypervisor, typically used for I/O or other operations needing high performance. These allow HVM guests with suitable minor modifications to gain many of the performance benefits of paravirtualized I/O. In current versions of Xen (up to 4.2) only fully virtualized HVM guests can make use of hardware facilities for multiple independent levels of memory protection and paging. As a result, for some workloads, HVM guests with PV drivers (also known as PV-on-HVM, or PVH) provide better performance than pure PV guests. Xen HVM has device emulation based on

2610-499: The key characteristics of cloud computing ). RightScale is among third-party providers to have announced support for this API. Cloud Sites is a platform as a service offering now owned by Liquid Web, similar to traditional web hosting only built on horizontally scalable hardware infrastructure. A fixed monthly credit card payment gives users access to the service with an allocation of compute, storage and bandwidth resources. Should this allocation be exhausted then subsequent usage

2668-679: The mainline kernel. The releases up to 3.0.4 also added: Internet hosting service companies use hypervisors to provide virtual private servers . Amazon EC2 (from August 2006 to November 2017), IBM SoftLayer , Liquid Web, Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform , Linode , OrionVM and Rackspace Cloud use Xen as the primary VM hypervisor for their product offerings. Virtual machine monitors (also known as hypervisors) also often operate on mainframes and large servers running IBM, HP, and other systems. Server virtualization can provide benefits such as: Xen's support for virtual machine live migration from one host to another allows load balancing and

2726-447: The most privileged domain ("dom0") - the only virtual machine which by default has direct access to hardware. From the dom0 the hypervisor can be managed and unprivileged domains ("domU") can be launched. The dom0 domain is typically a version of Linux or BSD . User domains may either be traditional operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows under which privileged instructions are provided by hardware virtualization instructions (if

2784-518: The need to emulate a full set of hardware and firmware services, which makes a PV system simpler to manage and reduces the attack surface exposed to potentially malicious guests. On 32-bit x86, the Xen host kernel code runs in Ring 0 , while the hosted domains run in Ring 1 (kernel) and Ring 3 (applications). CPUs that support virtualization make it possible to run unmodified guests, including proprietary operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows). This

2842-451: The older "Xen" trademark. A new community website was launched at xenproject.org as part of the transfer. Project members at the time of the announcement included: Amazon, AMD, Bromium, CA Technologies, Calxeda, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, and Verizon. The Xen project itself is self-governing. Since version 3.0 of the Linux kernel , Xen support for dom0 and domU exists in

2900-571: The power of PC architecture servers with each new generation of processor, data centers became filled with thousands of servers. In the late 1990s utility computing re-surfaced. InsynQ, Inc. launched [on-demand] applications and desktop hosting services in 1997 using HP equipment. In 1998, HP set up the Utility Computing Division in Mountain View, California, assigning former Bell Labs computer scientists to begin work on

2958-604: The pricing page for the old products. The minimum charge for the lowest product on the First Generation platform is $ 10.95 per month for the 256 MB instance while the minimum charge on the Standard Next Generation platform is $ 16.06 per month for the 512 MB instance. On the Performance platform, the minimum charge for one server is $ 23.36 for the 1 GB instance plus $ 50 minimum service charge, for

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3016-578: The publication of this port, although documentation of the experience appears in the original Xen SOSP paper. James Harper and the Xen open-source community have started developing free software paravirtualization drivers for Windows. These provide front-end drivers for the Xen block and network devices and allow much higher disk and network performance for Windows systems running in HVM mode. Without these drivers all disk and network traffic has to be processed through QEMU-DM. Subsequently, Citrix has released under

3074-542: The requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. Xen Project is currently available for the IA-32 , x86-64 and ARM instruction sets . Xen Project runs in a more privileged CPU state than any other software on the machine, except for firmware . Responsibilities of the hypervisor include memory management and CPU scheduling of all virtual machines ("domains"), and for launching

3132-463: The service was purchased in Rackspace's October 22, 2008, acquisition of Slicehost and the servers were formerly known as "slices". These are "much cheaper and generally easier to use than a traditional dedicated server", though it is still necessary to maintain the operating system and solution stack which is not required for the Cloud Sites product. This is one of the main differentiators between

3190-523: The two services; where Cloud Servers includes full root access and thus allows for more customisation, the Cloud Sites product is less flexible but requires less maintenance. On December 14, 2010, Rackspace began offering a managed service level on the Cloud Servers product, which added additional support for the operating system and common applications as well as patching and other routine services. This additional support level does come at an increased cost, however. During 2014, Rackspace ceased to advertise

3248-423: The underlying technology for their Cloud Servers product. The change will come a new control panel as well as add-on cloud services offering databases , server monitoring , block storage , and virtual networking . Utility computing Utility computing , or computer utility , is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to

3306-622: The world" which provides an additional layer of data redundancy. The control panel and API are protected by SSL and the requests themselves are signed and can be safely delivered to untrusted clients. Deleted data is zeroed out immediately. Use cases considered as "well suited" include backing up or archiving data, serving images and videos (which are streamed directly to the users' browsers), serving content over content delivery networks , storing secondary static web-accessible data, developing data storage applications, storing fluctuating and/or unpredictable amounts of data and reducing costs. There

3364-477: Was then dropped on June 17, 2009, in favour of "The Rackspace Cloud" branding (including the rackspacecloud.com domain name ). Since then, customer contracts were executed with Rackspace US, Inc. d/b/a The Rackspace Cloud rather than with the Mosso LLC subsidiary. Other companies (such as EMC Corporation with its "Decho" subsidiary) also use alternative branding for their cloud computing offerings. In 2011,

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