As the demand for cloud services continues to increase, service providers face some of the most difficult challenges regarding their storage environment. To combat this very problem, City Network Hosting, a premier provider of exchange hosting services, has selected Gluster’s storage solution, for dynamic cloud services platform, City Cloud.

A hosted exchange service used by more than 500 Swedish companies, City Cloud, has been launched recently after more than 15 months in beta.

Gluster cloud storage was chosen by City Network because of its ability to provide the scalability and reliability needed to meet the company’s growing business demands without affecting performance.

In a press release, Johan Christenson, chairman of City Network, said, “We believe our business as a whole will, to a large extent, be judged on performance, as our leading cloud solutions continue to grow. Our customers expect extreme performance from their applications. We need a storage solution like Gluster that delivers reliability and can scale on-demand without hindering the quality of performance. Additionally, with Gluster we didn’t need to make the sacrifice of performance in order to make it fit our budget. There are real savings in the fact that you can combine off-the-shelf hardware, while at the same time creating a powerhouse of reliability, scalability and performance.”

The growth of City Cloud makes it rely heavily on the elastic scaling capabilities of storage. This reliance makes it necessary for storage to have extreme growth capacity, in addition to the never sacrifice performance as that growth kicks in.

Customer applications run in virtual machines that are hosted on blade servers with multi-tenant access to the Gluster storage deployment. Storage that fits seamlessly in a virtualized data center is required by this large scale VM environment.

VMs, in the event of a blade failure, can migrate to a new blade with continued access to the data. To ensure high availability of the data, City Cloud uses Gluster’s file replication capabilities.

City Network, because of the success City Cloud is experiencing with Gluster, is planning to roll out Gluster for all of its services – cloud, email, shared hosting, etc.

In related news, Gluster has announced a partnership with RightScale, Inc., a company engaged in cloud computing management, to provide Gluster's scale-out storage technology within the RightScale Cloud Management Platform.