Revolutionary cloud storage

Significantly improve cloud server availability and performance with elastic, scalable Parallels Cloud Storage. Parallels Cloud Storage uses the existing unused disk space on your server nodes to deliver cloud storage at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions.

• Fault tolerant — no single point of failure
• High performance — equivalent to local disks
• Lowest cost cloud storage solution available

Learn why Parallels Cloud Storage is the ideal solution for hosters.

High density, high performance container virtualization

Parallels Cloud Server includes Parallels Containers, the highest density, highest performance cloud server virtualization solution, enabling near instant provisioning and on-the-fly modification of hosting and cloud server plans.

• Three times the density of hypervisors
• Cloud elasticity
• Instant-on provisioning
• Instant live migration — move an entire server node in seconds
• Rebootless upgrades eliminate planned downtime

Learn more about Parallels Containers and how they deliver the highest performance cloud servers.

High performance virtual machines

Parallels Cloud Server gives you the flexibility to create virtual machines with Parallels Hypervisor for customers who prefer to manage and maintain their own operating systems.

• OS flexibility — run any operating system inside your server
• Streamline installation and maintenance with bare metal installation

Learn about all the new virtualization features and benefits in Parallels Cloud Server.

Drive profit with the most complete and automated cloud services enablement solutions

With Parallels Cloud Server service providers can deploy a super-efficient cloud hosting infrastructure and offer a wide range of hosting and cloud services that appeal to the broadest possible customer base. Parallels Cloud Server is optimized to work with all Parallels hosting and cloud enablement solutions including Parallels Plesk Panel, Parallels Automation, and Parallels Business Automation Standard.

New features and improvements:

Cloud storage

• Turn existing server disk space into a resilient cloud storage pool
• Store and run Parallels virtual machines and containers
• Eliminate VPS downtime due to HDD and RAID controller failures
• Zero downtime server migration and non-disruptive replication
• Deliver high availability cloud servers

New container layout

• Stores all files in a single image, enabling easy migrations and backups
• Improves server performance

Memory and IOPS deduplication

• Efficiently caches identical files found in multiple containers to reduce I/O and memory bottlenecks and increase the number of running containers per server

Rebootless updates

• Eliminates service outages for end users during system updates

Console access to containers.

• Use the container console to log into a running container and view the progress of the startup and shutdown processes

Updates with yum

• The vzup2date utility has been replaced with the standard yum utility, greatly simplifying the procedure of updating all components of your system

Containers with pre-installed application templates

• Pre-install application templates to OS EZ template caches to speed up containers creation

Increased virtual machines limits

• Create virtual machines with up to 32 CPU cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 5 TB of virtual disk space

Read more about the new features and benefits

Introductory Information

What is Parallels Cloud Server?
Parallels Cloud Server combines Parallels Cloud Storage with Parallels Containers and Parallels Hypervisor to dramatically improve server reliability, performance and profitability. Parallels Cloud Storage allows service providers to build a reliable and highly available distributed shared storage cluster which performs similar to a SAN. However, Parallels Cloud Storage is much more cost effective since it uses existing unused free disk space on your current servers. This eliminates the need for the dedicated shared storage hardware normally required by SANs and provides the lowest cost cloud storage available. Parallels Cloud Server allows you to store and run Parallels virtual machines and containers, eliminate VPS downtime due to hardware failures, provide high availability servers, perform instant live migration of servers between physical hosts, and scale available storage beyond the locally available disk space.

Who is the ideal customer for Parallels Cloud Server?
Parallels Cloud Server is designed for hosting providers who want to dramatically improve server availability and reliability while reducing costs.

Do I need to buy additional storage hardware with Parallels Cloud Server?
No, Parallels Cloud Server eliminates the need for external storage devices typically used in SANs by converting locally attached storage from multiple nodes into shared storage.

Can I deploy hypervisors and containers on the same physical node with Parallels Cloud Server?
Yes. Parallels Cloud Server allows you to specify the number of hypervisors and containers that you can deploy on the hardware node.

Can I deploy Windows VPS offerings using Parallels Cloud Server?
Yes. Parallels Cloud Server includes Parallels Hypervisor which allows you to deploy Windows within the hypervisor, enabling Windows VPS offerings that can leverage the high reliability enabled with Parallels Cloud Server.

Licensing

How is the Parallels Cloud Server licensed?
Parallels Cloud Server licensing is scalable to meet the needs of service providers. Containers and virtual machines are licensed based on the number of servers per node. Cloud storage licensing is based on the amount of enabled storage in 100 GB increments, to allow easy scalability as demand grows.

How can I buy Parallels Cloud Server?
Download it directly from the Download Parallels Cloud Server page.

Is there an evaluation key for Parallels Cloud Server?
Yes, please contact our sales team for a trial evaluation key

Storage scalability and performance

Is there a limit on the number of storage nodes?
There is no strict limit on number of storage nodes. However, we recommend limiting the servers in the cluster to a single rack to avoid any possible performance degradation that can occur with inter-rack communications.

What is the limit on the total disk space?
Parallels Cloud Server can scale to support up to 1 PB of effective available disk space, which means up to 3PB of physical disk space in the case of mirroring with 3 copies.

Can I add additional nodes or storage capacity to an existing Parallels Cloud Server cluster?
Yes, you can dynamically add and remove nodes from a Parallels Cloud Server 6.0 Beta 2 cluster to increase capacity or to remove node(s) for maintenance.

What is the expected performance of Parallels Cloud Server storage?
The performance will depend on the hard disks used and the network speed. However, the performance should be comparable to locally attached storage and in some cases even better! Additionally Parallels Cloud Server supports advanced SSD caching which increases the performance of commodity hardware by adding small, inexpensive SSD drives to the cluster for caching purposes.

What performance should I expect on 1Gbit ethernet?
The 1Gbit ethernet network maximum speed is close to that of a single rotational drive, however, in most workloads random I/O access is prevalent and the network is not a bottleneck. Research with large service providers demonstrates that average I/O performance rarely goes above 20MB/sec due to randomization. Virtualization itself introduces additional randomization as multiple independent environments perform I/O access simultaneously. Regardless, 10Gbit ethernet will result in better performance and is recommended when possible.

Does the addition of new storage nodes or disks improve the overall performance for existing users?
Yes, since data is distributed among all hard drives in the cluster, applications performing random I/O will experience an increase in IOPS when more drives are added to the cluster. Even a single client machine may get noticeable benefits by increasing the number of storage nodes and achieve performance far beyond traditional local attached storage.

Does performance depend on the number of replicas?
Each additional data copy degrades write performance about 10%. However, it may improve read performance since Parallels Cloud Server has more options to select a faster server.

Storage availability

How does Parallels Cloud Storage protect server data?
Parallels Cloud Storage protects against data loss or temporary unavailability by mirroring data to a specified number of copies (replicas) placed on different machines to protect the data from single point hardware and control failures. To provide additional reliability Parallels Cloud Storage can be configured to maintain user data checksums and verify them on access and on an ongoing basis.

What happens when a disk is lost or a server node is unavailable for whatever reason?
Parallels Cloud Storage automatically recovers from a degraded state to the specified redundancy level by replicating data on live nodes. Data access is still available during the recovery.

How fast does Parallels Cloud Storage recover from a degraded state?
Since Parallels Cloud Server recovers from a degraded state using all the available hard disks in the cluster this process is much faster than with traditional locally attached RAIDs. Overall this makes the reliability of the storage system significantly better as the probability of losing the only remaining copy of data during the recovery period is very small.

Can I change redundancy settings on the fly?
Yes, you can change number of data copies and Parallels Cloud Server will dynamically adjust by creating new copies or removing unneeded ones.

Do I still need to use local RAID?
No, Parallels Cloud Storage provides the same built-in data redundancy as a mirror RAID1 array with multiple copies. However, for better sequential performance it is possible to use local stripping RAID0 exported to the Parallels Cloud Storage cluster.

Does Parallels Cloud Storage have redundancy levels similar to RAID5?
No, it is not possible to build a reliable software-based RAID5 system without also including special hardware capabilities like backup power batteries. In the future Parallels Cloud Storage may provide RAID5 level redundancy for read-only data such as backups.

What is the recommended number of data copies?
We recommend configuring Parallels Cloud Storage to maintain 2 or 3 copies, which allows the storage system to survive the simultaneous loss of 1 or 2 hard drives.

Compatibility and requirements

What are the hardware requirements for Parallels Cloud Storage?
Parallels Cloud Storage does not require any special hardware and can run on commodity nodes with traditional SATA drives and 1Gbit ethernet networks. Some hard drives and RAID controllers ignore the FLUSH command to imitate better performance and must not be used as this may lead to file system or database corruptions. This is especially true for RAID controllers and SSD drives. Please consult with the drive manual to make sure you use reliable hardware.

Can I run Parallels Cloud Storage with one node?
You can, but this does not provide any advantages over locally attached storage except for the ability to seamlessly grow to multi-node configurations and to take advantage of Parallels Cloud Storage caching features.