OpenStack and the KVM hypervisor power the company's new rigs, which can run Ubuntu 14.04, CentOS 6 or 7, Fedora 23, Debian 8, FreeBSD, CoreOS, and Arch Linux.
For now, the servers will run in only two United States data centers, but bit barns in The Netherlands and Singapore will come online soon. Windows servers are another imminent addition.
Dell provided the hardware in the form of PowerEdge C6000 and C6220 II servers, all packing an E5-2630Lv at 2 2.4GHz with 16GB of RAM.
Can GoDaddy become a player? The company is deliberately not taking on the likes of Amazon Web Services or Azure. Nor is it offering full elasticity, instead offering plans for certain combinations of server grunt, storage capacity, I/O, and data transfer.
The servers-as-a-service service launched in 26 languages, 53 countries, and 44 currencies, a deliberate attempt at being just about global on
day one.
The company thinks that combination makes it an alternative to the likes of Linode or Digital Ocean, companies that offer pretty much the same service without massive differentiation in features or price among the three.
This probably doesn't matter because
GoDaddy says it has "integrated" the servers with its DNS and domain
name services, meaning this is foremost a product extension play and not
a broad attack on the cloud market. ®
