Philadelphia, PA, USA, June 1. Razor Servers announced today that it will begin offering Cloud Computing services to its customers, using the Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), Service Provider Edition. This will be the first Cloud Computing service based in Pennsylvania.

Razor Servers will host the ECP cloud computing platform within its Philadelphia datacenter, enabling Razor Servers customer to access computing capacity on demand. Razor Servers Cloud Computing service is expected to be available to customers on June 15, 2009. Razor Servers Enomaly ECP-based Cloud Computing service can be used to host web sites, to power internal business applications, and to provide burst capacity to meet peak loads for existing systems. Razor Servers ECP Cloud Computing platform enables customers to access and manage any number of virtual servers, running Microsoft Windows, Linux, or any other operating system. Customers access and manage their virtual servers through a web-based dashboard. Customers can also automatically scale up and down their use of cloud servers through a robust web-based API.

“We are delighted to have Razor Servers among the select group of Charter Customers for the rollout of the Service Provider Edition of our Elastic Computing Platform”, stated Dr. Richard Reiner, CEO of Enomaly. “We believe customers of Razor Servers will benefit tremendously from having a Cloud Computing service available for their applications and overall needs.”

“The future of hosting is Cloud Computing,” added Matthew Kelly, CEO & President of Razor Servers. “We’re very excited to offer this Cloud Computing service, based on Enomaly’s platform. The ability to offer our customers Private Clouds, On Demand Services and Virtual Private Data Centers will be unmatched in the industry. Real time scalability is key in this day and age, which made this a logical addition to our services as part of our ongoing commitment to meet our customer’s highest expectations”.

About Razor Servers:
Razor Servers is a market leader in Dedicated Server, VPS, Gaming and Colocation hosting. Razor Servers provides it’s service to customers in over 65 countries. Razor Servers is based in Philadelphia, PA, USA. www.razorservers.com

About Enomaly, Inc.:
Enomaly is a leading vendor of Cloud Computing platform software. Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) is the answer for carriers, hosting providers, and enterprises that want to benefit from the power, flexibility, and compelling economics of cloud computing. Organizations around the world use ECP today to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to their customers and internal users, to seamlessly bridge computing tasks between their datacenters and public cloud providers, and to experience the increased business agility of cloud computing. Enomaly is based in Toronto, Canada, and has operations in Vancouver, Canada, South Korea, and Ukraine. www.enomaly.com

We’re very excited to say that over the past six months we’ve been testing multiple cloud computing solutions. This has created some interesting discussions amongst our staff. The main one being, what is cloud computing? The answer is, there is more than one answer. It depends greatly on what your purpose for using a cloud might be. Do you just need storage? Or do you want to have your applications actually processing on the cloud? Do you want High Availability? Here is a brief synopsis of the two different scenarios in a way that most people will understand but first let’s define what a cloud is.

What is a cloud?
In the most basic sense a cloud is a group of individual servers that are combined, using software, to create one large server. So if you had 10 servers and each had 8 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage you would have a cloud with 80 processor cores, 80 GB of RAM and 20 TB of storage. You would then have the option to either store data or run your applications and store the data from the cloud.

The advantages to cloud computing are many:

• Hardware failure is a non issue
• Disaster Recovery is now easily available to the masses
• Increase your resource requirements on demand
• No need to keep multiple servers sync’d
• High Availability is simple and uncomplicated

Cloud Storage
This is what a lot of people think of when they hear the term cloud computing. This is what category Amazon S3 would fall under. This type of cloud computing is for when you need to store data files somewhere and be able to access them remotely via your application. Generally this access is accomplished through the use of an API. In this scenario you would still run your application on your server, Virtual Dedicated Server or VPS.

Cloud Processing
This type of cloud computing is when your application AND data files reside on a cloud. This is what category Amazon EC2 would fall under. In this scenario you’re alloted a given amount of resources such as processor core(s), RAM and disk storage. Your applications are running in a virtualized environment within the cloud.

In this day and age as everyone begins to move to virtualization there are rarely issues running your applications in this fashion. We run many applications in a virtualized environment and it makes it much easier to manage. If we need to do hardware upgrades we simply migrate the virtual server to a different hardware node. Now, the beauty of hosting your applications on a cloud is you don’t need to worry about hardware! A server in the cloud could die and you won’t know the difference.

Many of you may be asking, “Why don’t I just use Amazon?” The answer is control. If you were to have a Private Cloud you could create new virtual servers, install your own applications and create your own service templates on your own. The other issue is cost. As you scale up it will be less expensive to have a Private Cloud under your control than to pay by the hour. With a private cloud you are the only one using it, nothing is shared. Think of it as your own Virtual Private Data Center. The power of this type of hosting is limitless.

In the coming months you’ll see us offering both types of cloud computing. For a sneak peak at our upcoming offering take a look here.

We get a lot of customers asking how to wget a file from the linux shell using a username and password. As many of you know it is easy to download a file using wget but many don’t know what to do if a downloadable file requires a username and password. It’s very simple.


These parameters can be overridden using the –ftp-user and –ftp-password options for FTP connections and the –http-user and –http-password options for HTTP connections.


Download a file called foo.pdf from theos.in:
$ wget –user=vivek –password=’myPassword’ http://whatever.you.are.downloading.com/file

We get a lot of customers asking us how to setup a vpn on their VPS. I’ve gone ahead and outlined the process for accomplishing this task as a reference for all our customers, and anyone else who might need it.


Link to the wiki article is here


OpenVZ supports VPN inside a container via kernel TUN/TAP module and device. To allow container #101 to use the TUN/TAP device the following should be done:


Make sure the tun module has been already loaded on the hardware node:


# lsmod | grep tun


If it is not there, use the following command to load tun module:


# modprobe tun


You can also add it into /etc/modules.conf to make sure it will be loaded on every reboot automatically.

Granting container an access to TUN/TAP
Allow your container to use the tun/tap device:


vzctl set 101 –devices c:10:200:rw –save
vzctl set 101 –capability net_admin:on –save


And create the character device file inside the container:


vzctl exec 101 mkdir -p /dev/net
vzctl exec 101 mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200
vzctl exec 101 chmod 600 /dev/net/tun

Configuring VPN inside container
After the configuration steps above are done it is possible to use VPN software working with TUN/TAP inside container just like on a usual standalone linux box.


The following software can be used for VPN with TUN/TAP:


* Virtual TUNnel (http://vtun.sourceforge.net)
* OpenVPN (http://openvpn.sourceforge.net

As many of you have noticed, we’ve launched our new website for Razor Servers. I can’t explain how much I like this new site. Corey over at coreymade.com did a fantastic job. I highly recommend his services.

Bryan at nullivex created a new order system to interface with ubersmith. This has made our lives a whole lot easier since it’s launch. We can now track orders through the built in order manager in ubersmith, which I think is one of the nicest features of that software. We’re already working on upgrades for version 2 of the order system that I hope will add even more options to those placing orders.

If you have any feedback about the new website please let us know!

I came across a nice, downloadable, linux command cheat sheet today. A customer asked me if we had anything like this because they were new to linux and wanted an easy way to reference commands until they become fluid. In the interest of possibly helping out our other customers I thought I would post the link here.

Linux Cheat Sheet

We’ve been testing the deployment software linmin and so far I’m pretty happy with it.  The support we’re receiving from them is out of this world.  We’ve run into some snags deploying Windows 2003 onto the Supermicro hardware but the linmin staff are working diligently to get this problem solved.  Leave it to us to find hardware that doesn’t actually work with their system.  So far we’re the only one’s with linmin that has had a problem.

Anyone looking for a bare metal  installation system should definitely check this out.

This video is pretty funny to a techie who has been involved in the hosting industry since before SPAM was an issue. This takes place and the RIPE conference from this year.

We’ve come across an interesting problem with the Supermicro X7DA8 motherboard and Antec power supply. Evidently there is a voltage issue on the 12v side that sometimes causes the motherboard to not fully power up. We have confirmed this compatibility issue with both Supermicro and Antec. This problem can be eliminated in a few ways:

• Run one Xeon processor and fan instead of two
• Run no more than 4 GB of RAM with 2 Xeon processors
• Replace the Antec power supply

Obviously the third solution is the best but may not always be feasible in a pinch. We have decided to take the third option and replace all the power supplies on the Xeons that have this combination. In 90% of cases it is not a problem, if the machine powers on it will stay on. However, in the other 10% we see some irregularity and we make the swap to a new power supply.