Large, traditional large Internet data centres across Asia may soon become extinct, as Web hosting companies, Internet service providers (ISPs) and hosting service providers (HSPs) implement automation software and advanced networking tools that will allow them to house hundreds of virtual environments on a single physical server. Competition is already heating up, as companies struggle to sustain the momentum generated over the past five years. With telcos entering the marketplace and the Internet becoming more complex, HSPs and Web hosting companies are quickly realising that manual operation of the Internet data centre will no longer give them the ammunition they need to stay competitive. Enter Singapore-headquartered software firm SWsoft Pte, with HSPcomplete to help ISPs maximise the performance and revenue potential of their business. Developed by SWsoft, Linux kernel maintainer Alexey Kuznetsov and a team of engineers at Moscow's prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), HSPcomplete allows better network control and less operational downtime. It is powered by Virtuozzo, which offers virtualisation, resource management and clustering features to enable service providers to improve utilization of hardware and fully automate provisioning and system management operations. SWsoft's first customer was 1-Net Singapore, the country's largest broadband exchange. According to 1-Net business development manager Luke Lee: "Our customers get a cost-effective, flexible and scalable hosting environment in double-quick time...For us, this makes more sense than buying multiple servers, each of which need to be configured and (which) only serve tens of customers in the traditional housing schema. We've not had to allocate additional technical manpower." Last week, CNET Asia caught up with Serguei Beloussov, the locally based founder and chief executive officer of SWsoft, on his company's automation software for Internet data centres: Question: What issues are hogging the Internet hosting industry today?
Despite the glowing predictions and successes of the hosting industry, data centres are still looking for underlying hosting infrastructures that increase profitability while growing their customer base and decreasing ongoing operational costs. There is a trend amongst service providers in Asian markets, to implement automation software that allows them to better control the network, manage resources, centralize accounting procedures and maximise the potential of their data center. Aside from inherent sales and marketing challenges associated with the antiquated manual control system, HSPs, ISPs and other service providers are using software solutions to achieve the highest availability and performance across a secure network. Can you provide greater details on the existing problems faced by traditional Web hosting technology?
With literally hundreds of Web sites being housed on a single, physical server, HSPs experience significant cost savings with virtual environments (VE). VE has transformed new value to traditional Web hosting, including allowing individual companies to implement their own Web server configuration, use their own Web sever version, and have full isolation, etc. Industry analysts have identified hosting automation as an important topic going forward, impressed with its ability to solve problems previously inherent to the technology:

Systems management -- Manual systems management does not allow for intelligent delegation of operation responsibility, causing decreased performance and availability.

Resource management -- Data centre server farms currently use less than 2 percent of available space because resources are not intelligently managed across a network.

Service-level management -- The service components inside the data centre do not integrate well and produce a lack of service-level monitoring and reporting.

Availability -- Significant downtime occurs in "normal" servers that are not suited for availability within seconds.

Security -- Shared physical space on a single server is expensive in a manually operated system and often produces high-levels of "denial-of-service" attacks and the need for physical access to services.

Billing/Accounting problems -- Most server configurations are not flexible enough to integrate ample billing and accounting systems, creating a cumbersome billing process.

What are service providers in Asia doing to overcome those obstacles?
This trend of housing a large number of sites on a single, virtual environment is catching on with data centers around the world. Customers across Asia like it that HSPcomplete creates high-availability server configurations in a secure environment. Having entered the market in early 2001, 1-Net integrated HSPcomplete to offer Web sites dedicated server without the cost of owning hardware. Spending less time and money maintaining their network, 1-Net offers customers a full-suite of services -- from shared Web hosting for small and medium-sized businesses to virtualisation and resource management features -- at affordable rates. What other benefits does automated software bring to the table?
The key to success with automated software solutions will be to seamlessly integrate into existing networks and include management tools that coordinate billing and accounting cycles. With a central GUI, HSPcomplete allows ISP Managers to both perform application upgrades with the click of a button and monitor company billing cycles. Manual operation of an Internet data centre is a dinosaur and companies using costly and arduous systems will render themselves extinct as well. Automated software is a radically new solution that provides hundreds of virtual environments for customers, each one failsafe, secure, monitored and managed in a cost effective way, thus improving the economics of the HSP business. For the latest news on Web hosting, plus comment, analysis, briefing papers, help and our events guide, see ZDNet UK's Web Hosting News Section. Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Click on the TalkBack button and go to the ZDNet news forum. Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom. And read other letters.