Cartika Adds Vim and Vigor to Virtual Private Servers

MSP Cartika already had a range of virtual private server (VPS) services, but was looking for a bit more oomph. The answer: adding a dose of management from new partner OnApp.

Cartika, which sells managed services and hosting from its Canadian headquarters, is already building new VPS services using the OnApp Cloud Platform, and will host the services in Canada and the U.S.

A virtual private server is pretty much akin to a virtual machine, but is a virtualization approach favored by Internet providers. Like a VM, it runs within a physical server, alongside other virtual machines. But the VPS is a higher level VM that is entirely separate from the other VMs acting as its own full computer, and is assigned to a specific customer.

Current Cartika VPS services include:

• Private VPS farms
• Managed VPS servers and clusters
• Self-managed IaaS virtual machines

New wares include “self-managed and Cartika-managed VPS services, managed VPS clusters and complete VPS farms,” the company said. “A migration plan for existing VPS customers will be launched in the very near future, along with packages designed for Cartika's thousands of shared hosting and VPS resellers.”

Cartika is happy that it replaced its Citrix VPS infrastructure with OnApp. "OnApp is designed for service providers. It's very easy to deploy, incredibly quick to set up and has a full range of features ready-to-run, out of the box," said Andrew Rouchotas, CEO of Cartika.  "Working with the OnApp team we were live and accepting new business in seven days, and we reached a positive ROI in the first three days. This time-to-market is basically unbeatable."

The Cartika services can be fine-tuned by customers who can decide how much disk, network speed, memory and CPU they need. OnApp adds a number of new capabilities, such as “autoscaling, utility and plan billing, virtual machine templates, snapshots and extensive automation of day-to-day admin tasks for servers and virtual machines,” the MSP said.