Sphera plans to host the farm
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Israeli company Sphera hopes to make the life of the hosting-centre admin easier with its HostingDirector system.
Server administration can give web hosting companies a permanent headache. So-called 'server farms', with several thousand machines, make the job of maintaining and monitoring them a task almost worthy of King Canute.
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Israeli company Sphera aims to make the systems administrator's role easier by automating the task. Its flagship product is called HostingDirector.
Rather than deploying heavy-duty systems management tools to administer hundreds of servers, HostingDirector borrows a concept from the mainframe and high-end Unix world and 'partitions' each server into smaller chunks independent of one another. And, since each server behaves like a group of servers, administrators only need to monitor a comparative handful of machines.
Sphera claims it is the scalability, support for billing and customer relationship management applications, combined with the ease of use of its administration program, which sets HostingDirector apart and brings down costs.
Its backers seem to think so too. The company raised $15 million (€16.5m) in its second round of funding in October 2001 and added $5 million (€5.5m) to that sum in January 2002, shortly after announcing deals with IBM and Microsoft. IBM is marketing HostingDirector as part of its Blue Velocity-branded service provider initiative, while Microsoft has helped Sphera make its product compatible with the Windows 2000 operating system.
"With simple web hosting a commodity service, web hosters must sell higher margin managed services, at lower cost, to generate profits," says Aberdeen Group analyst George Peabody. "With HostingDirector, a junior support technician can bring up a complex web site, potentially saving hundreds of dollars in labour costs."
However, there is a potentially serious drawback. Most servers that offer partitioning do so as a hardware-based option. The danger with Sphera's product is that an application or operating system failure could bring down the whole system. Putting too much faith in software – rather than easily replaceable servers or an ultra-reliable high-end server – is rarely an option that hosting companies and their customers generally find palatable.
For now, Sphera may have to settle for a niche at the low end of the web hosting market, among providers running a few servers for low-traffic or non-business critical web sites. It must prove its reliability in high-end, high-demand environments before the bigger web hosting companies show interest.
