Slicehost

A few weeks ago, we received an email from Stephen Spector of Citrix. He’s the Community Manager for Xen.org and wanted a site for the Xen blog. He knew we were proponents of Xen and after a brief chat the blog was up and running. We’re honored to have the site at Slicehost and grateful for the work that goes into the Xen.org project. If you’re looking for updates and news on the virtualization software that powers your slice, blog.xen.org is the place to go.

Data Center Knowledge links to a couple of interesting articles on rising NOC costs. Increased power requirements for equipment and cooling are driving space costs through the roof. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly bigger companies explore virtual computing alternatives. If you’re interested in discussing Slice clusters for your company, please let us know.

Scott from hosting-fu compares a VPS to a dedicated server. Several excellent points, our 1024slice was pitted against an entry level dedicated box. A must read for anyone weighing the pros and cons of a VPS or dedicated machine.

We’ve had a few customers inquire about bulk Slice purchases for various reasons including: classroom use, virtual infrastructure, load balancing and more. These are all great ideas. For businesses, considering a cluster of Slices for server consolidation makes even more sense. Check out this stat:

We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year.

Wow! Let us know if you’re interested in a bulk purchase and we can put something together for you. With skyrocketing cooling and data center costs, there’s never been a better time to consider virtual server consolidation.