I just spent 3 days at the HostingCon conference in San Diego.   For a cloud service provider, it was pretty eye-opening to for the first time, see the entire ecosystem for hosters as opposed to the pure enterprise-cloud world that we normally work with.   What is amazing is that the bulk of the revenue from Hosting/Bulk Hosting/Shared Hosting still comes from individual servers running unvirtualized CPanel/Plesk or other control panels.   Many of the booths at the show offered add-ins or enhancements to CPanel to allow it to deliver more robust services, including better security, reporting, and load management.   There was even one vendor who offered a clustered CPanel setup promising high performance.  However, the dominance of control panels is being challenged by companies like OnApp, which offers an environment of easy virtual machine deployment with a control-panel like interface and hoster-friendly setup.

There were also a number of vendors showing SaaS services that complement traditional hosting.  Cloud Flare and a few other security-as-a-service offerings that replace hardware firewalls (including web application firewalls) seem to be showing promise at reducing the cost of security and DDOS mitigation.  Cloud Flare offers caching for javascript and images on DNS-optimized points of presence, essentially making it a CDN as well.   There were also some monitoring and billing vendors and third-party PCI certification companies, which reflected the increasing sophistication of both hosting companies and their customers.

A few hardware vendors came to show off their latest wares.   SuperMicro and Dell now offer mini-blades of up to 12 1-socket servers plus disk in a single 2U chassis.   DataOn showed a drawer-style JBOD system similar to Sun's old "thumper" system, with very high density.  AmpliData has an object storage system with high performance and lower power density.

What was missing from the show was any kind of "real" enterprise-style cloud product, offering virtual private datacenters and management capabilities based on hierarchical customer entities.   It appears that both hosters and their customers are still happy with the traditional hosting model, leaving cloud computing to upmarket and vertical-market ecosystems.

This meant that I didn't really have a compatible language to describe to people I met what it is that ENKI does.    I finally came upon the idea to use old (hosting-age) terminology to describe the new generation of cloud services that ENKI offers:

dedicated server -> virtual dedicated server

colocation -> virtual colocation  (a customer-managed virtual private datacenter)

IT services -> virtual IT services (provider managed production IT in the cloud)

With this Rosetta Stone based on the concept of virtualization, I was able to get some good conversations going with hosters about the similarities and differences in our products and approaches, and how we could serve our customers better.   In particular, many cloud customers start with hosting and/or VPS services (especially as they prototype their websites), necessitating a strong cross-pollination of hosting and cloud vendors and services in order to better serve the market and avoid the customer disasters that Amazon experienced a couple months ago.

In addition, I saw that our private cloud deployment service, PrimaSys, based on our Computing Utility, is a good match for hosting providers looking to move into the cloud world, since it offers turnkey VPS provisioning, while also allowing whole applications to be deployed with a single click.