Virtuozzo’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud Solutions Help Hosts Slash Costs and Boost Performance

TL; DR: Virtuozzo, a pioneer in the container technology space, provides value-added services that empower providers to boost revenue and availability while cutting costs. The company offers a broad portfolio of virtualization, software-defined storage, and hyperconvergence solutions. With its new, fully-managed hybrid cloud services, Virtuozzo also provides a simplified, cost-effective way for service providers to launch alternative cloud services.

Four hosting behemoths dominate the cloud infrastructure space: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. These providers, known as hyperscalers for their scalable virtual architecture, earned a combined revenue of $86 billion in 2020 alone.

But even the hyperscalers can’t do everything for everyone. According to Alex Fine, CEO of Virtuozzo, AWS and the like essentially offer consumer retail products.

“They’re the Coca-Colas of cloud infrastructure,” Alex told us. “They may provide a good customer experience, but it’s more on an individual scale and for some well-defined use cases. And if you need local support, if you need local services, you cannot get them from Amazon.”

Virtuozzo — a provider of virtualization, software-defined storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure — aims to partner with hosting providers to redefine the future of hosting. By helping them launch next-generation public and private cloud services, Virtuozzo empowers hosts to increase revenue, boost compute density, and eliminate barriers to customer growth.

More than 450 service providers, independent software vendors, and enterprises trust Virtuozzo to provide their customers with the services needed to run mission-critical workloads. The company offers a broad portfolio of virtualization, software-defined storage, and hyperconvergence solutions.

These technologies enable service providers to optimize costs by integrating containers, virtual machines, and storage with virtualization solutions. Working with Virtuozzo also allows service providers to modernize their applications and expand into new markets with hyperconverged infrastructure solutions.

And now, with the introduction of managed hybrid cloud services, Virtuozzo is serving up cost-friendly options for service providers to launch alternative cloud services.

Virtuozzo developed the first commercially available container technology 21 years ago. Along the way, the company has contributed to several open-source projects, including Docker, KVM, OpenStack, OpenVZ, and the Linux kernel.

“We were the inventors of system containers,” Alex said. “Then we produced the proprietary software-defined storage about nine years ago and introduced our hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution at the end of 2019.”

Virtuozzo is a market leader in the hosting space and number one in virtual private server (VPS) enablement. Alex told us that open-source solutions are the company’s biggest competition in that area.

“We can bring value to hosting providers in 98% of cases,” Alex said. “Regardless of how long they’ve been in the market, our solution suite will deliver higher performance at a better cost. From a business perspective, from a total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective, and from a return on investment (ROI) perspective, we beat any free open source solution.”

According to Virtuozzo, the company can help hosts boost ROI and slash costs by over 30% while providing more value to customers. Virtuozzo also makes it possible for them to increase revenue up to 200% by migrating clients from shared hosting to VPS with a special migration kit.

“People have deceiving thoughts about open-source — that it’s free and easy to take advantage of in-house with a staff of developers,” Alex said. “But you end up becoming a software company, which you don’t want because it’s a very specific and heavy business. We employ some of the best Linux engineers in the world and created somewhat of a masterpiece by building off of open-source technology.”

Virtuozzo aims to play a pivotal role in the future of the hosting industry.

“The hosting provider world is evolving; many of them are facing existential threats as hyperscalers are dominating more and more of the market,” Alex said. “Some hosting providers will question their relevance in the VPS market, but we fundamentally believe that this market will evolve. And we are part of the revolution.”

He said hosting providers must make a leap from catering to basic needs to providing solutions that create the best possible customer experience.

“This is where we are creating bundles that hosting providers can bring to the market and provide their end users a great experience via intuitive management, clear dashboards, and high performance,” he said. “Our product portfolio is extremely relevant and holistic.”

Alex pointed to VZLinux, the company’s alternative to CentOS. RedHat, CentOS’s parent company, recently announced it is shifting from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream, leaving many organizations looking for other options.

In response, Virtuozzo released VZLinux, a version of Virtuozzo Linux 8 that is free to download, use, and distribute. The goal is to assist organizations and their end customers with an easy path to upgrade or move the existing assets from CentOS.

“We see the opportunity here to provide a one-for-one replacement for CentOS that is open source, that is free, and will be free forever,” Alex said.

The company also makes it easy for hosts to help their end users evolve by transitioning from shared to virtualized hosting environments.

“We have this initiative that’s called shared hosting to VPS upgrade — it’s a seamless, almost one-click service provider experience,” Alex said. “There’s minimal downtime before you’re in your new individual, dedicated virtual port. We’re seeing a pretty unlimited opportunity for growth for hosts moving from open-source infrastructure into Virtuozzo. And we will be here forever.”

Virtuozzo also recently unveiled Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud, enabling managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) to efficiently design, build, and launch alternative cloud services

Alex told us that the cloud infrastructure market is growing as businesses become increasingly reliant on cloud-based services. In this environment, service providers have an opportunity to provide low-cost and straightforward alternatives to those traditional cloud providers.

“About 30% of the $120 billion cloud infrastructure market is made up of what we can call alternative cloud providers — basically the nonhyperscalers,” he said. “These providers have a huge opportunity to partner with us. We believe that regional alternative cloud providers will always be relevant because of regulation compliance, data sovereignty, latency, and local support they can provide.”

Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud is one of the few hybrid cloud systems explicitly designed to offer MSPs and CSPs an alternative, fully managed cloud solution with clear service level agreements and 24/7 production support. The solution allows service providers to focus on what’s really important — value-added services and project development — rather than infrastructure creation and maintenance.

“If you are a service provider, and you are thinking about bringing anything as-a-service into the market, our all-in-one platform can enable you to do so,” Alex said. “Everything is in one suite, supported by one vendor.”

The technology provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS), Storage as a Service (SaaS), and other cloud services.

Alex said services providers should keep an eye out for additional new and exciting releases designed to help push the industry forward.

“And as we speak, we’re opening many doors in the hosting provider world,” he said. “And you will hear a lot of announcements later this year with the large established market leaders who will start working with us.”