June 25th, 2008

Structure08 Interview with Scott Mueller of newservers.com, Dedicated Utility

I'm sitting down with Scott Mueller from NewServers™, Inc., a company with an innovative solution to rapidly deployed servers.

1. Tell me about NewServers™. How long have you been around, how many employees do you have, and where do you host?
   
   

   Scott Mueller: NewServers™ has been around since 2002, and have 11 employees over-seeing the day to day operations. We started out providing dedicated servers with monthly billing.

   We began hosting in level3, but left them to Switch & Data for better service. While hosting at Switch & Data, one of our customers introduced us to Internap, and we were blown away by their quaity of services. In Florida, Nap Of The Americas was the only option for Internap without an expensive back-haul component. After touring Nap Of The Americas, we were sold and migrated to them a few years back.

2. What about your footprint? How large is your presence, and how many servers do you have deployed currently?
   
   

   Scott Mueller: We currently have around 400 square ft of space in two cages, and just over 500 servers.

3. OK, tell me about your service? What is it, what makes it special, and what's the customer experience like?
   
   

   Scott Mueller: NewServers™ provides on-demand dedicated servers. We're like EC2, but we provide real, dedicated servers instead of virtualized ones. Our price point begins at $0.11 per instance hour for our small instance, which is a 2.8ghz Xeon with 512mb of memory running CentOS. We also have the option of Windows2003, and soon Windows2007. Our provisioning model is essentially a restore from backed up images, so it's very fast and can be done in minutes.

4. Actually rather than explain the customer experience, why don't I just experience it? (Pulls out my credit card).
   
   1. Setup an account, wait 5 minutes for the new account activation email to pass my grey-listing filters
   2. validate my account
   3. Choose to setup a Small CentOS 5 instance with 1gb of memory, a 2.8ghz proc, and a 36gb, 15kRPM scsi drive by clicking Add Now
   4. Get a screen that tells me how many servers I have provisioned.
   5. Clicking on the list of a server, I'm able to get the root password, and the IP Address. I ssh in.

   Total time from sign-up to sshing into a server: 9 minutes, 45 seconds.

5. What differentiates you from everybody else?
   
   Scott Mueller: Obviously, the first differentiation is that we provide real dedicated servers, instead of just virtual instances. There's no virtualization layer involved. We also provide free hardware load balancing. Each server comes with full KVM over IP access. IP addresses are also persistent, and can be reassigned to different instances.
   

• Do you have a persistent storage model?
  
  Scott Mueller: We do not, but there will be one soon. Soon you'll be able to store your data on a clustered storage array.
  
  
• How much bandwidth comes with the service, and how is it priced?
  
  Scott Mueller: Each instance comes with up to 2TB of bandwidth per month, which is pro-rated per hour based on usage. After 2TB of bandwidth per instance, the charges are $0.20 per Gigabyte of data transferred.
  
  
• What else can you tell me about where NewServers™ is heading?
  
  Scott Mueller: We are developing new services to compete with Amazon. Where Amazon's SimpleDB provides a flat-file database, we'll be providing a clustered PostgresSQL backed database offering like EnterpriseDB or PlumDB that will be based per hour of usage.
  
  
• How much capacity do you have?
  
  Scott Mueller: Right now we keep around a 20% buffer. We should currently have around 100 server instances available. If a customer calls us up and gives us a day or two notice, we can rapidly increase that as well.
  
  
• What makes you more compelling than EC2?
  
  Scott Mueller: We had 4 key differentiating features from Amazon when we launched.
  
  1. We provide free IP Addresses. The IP addresses can float between servers, and managed with ifconfig.
  2. All customers are assigned their own VLAN, which can help with regulatory issues.
  3. We can guarantee that redundant instances are not on the same physical piece of hardware, but still have low latency from each other. You can't do this with Amazon.
  4. We provide clustered hardware load balancers using the WebMux load-balancers.
     
     
• Any final words?
  
  Scott Mueller: What I really like about NewServers™ is the way we help business scale. When we first moved into this space, we addressed limitations in Amazon's model like persistent IP addresses, guaranteed low-latency hardware redundancy, and larger memory instances. We have customers whose business models wouldn't be possible without us.
  
  Michael T. Halligan: Scott, Thank you very much for your time.

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