Parallels containerises HP Moonshot servers

HP’s Moonshot servers are the company’s primary tool now for workloads such as web hosting and web serving, the everyday tasks of many enterprise on-premise operations as well as cloud service providers. Their key selling point is their low-energy requirements through the sharing of components such as networking, management, power and cooling capabilities. This is seen as providing significant efficiencies of scale and faster innovation cycles.

These advantages, of course, can then be wasted, or at least poorly utilised, if the operating environment is itself wasteful of resources. It is with a view to helping users overcoome such problems that hosting and cloud services enablement provider Parallels has pitched into the Moonshot marketplace with its Cloud Server virtualisation solution.

In essence, this uses a server template approach to build virtual `containers’ of a packaged server requirement. It makes it possible therefore to have a range templated server configurations that can be fired up rapidly as required. Any updates or changes can then be made once to the template, and rolled out to all instances at the same time, greatly easing management issues. It is, of course, also possible to have single templated containers for specialised virtual server requirtements.

This approach will allow Moonshot customers running the HP ProLiant m300 Server Cartridges to maximise their infrastructure investment by deploying multiple high density Parallels Containers on each Moonshot cartridge. The Containers provide advanced memory management capabilities that can improve the overall workload performance of the cartridge over bare metal.

The Containers approach also enables service providers to deliver multiple VPS and cloud server packages at varying levels of CPU, memory, disk I/O, and storage space.

 “Parallels server virtualization solution for HP Moonshot enables us to provide increased value to our customers by improving workload performance and advancing memory management capabilities.”

“With HP Moonshot, we are committed to helping enterprises and service providers address emerging web and analytics workloads while keeping energy, costs and data center space to a minimum,” said Paul Santeler, Vice President and General Manager of HP Moonshot, HP. “Parallels server virtualization solution for HP Moonshot enables us to provide increased value to our customers by improving workload performance and advancing memory management capabilities.”