Announcing SolusIO 1.1 Release

Announcing SolusIO 1.1 Release

After more than 2 years of development, SolusIO has reached the quality and feature completeness for production deployment. We first unveiled a preview of SolusIO to the world at the CloudFest conference in March 2019. We followed that with a Technical Preview and Beta release. It is now time to reveal the first production-ready release, SolusIO v1.1, a major milestone in this product’s evolution.

As the offspring of SolusVM, SolusIO was developed in close collaboration with its predecessor’s partner, user, and developer community. Some of you have been with us from the very beginning and have seen dramatic enhancements and changes since our initial Technical Preview release. Some of you – like NetNation – trusted us enough to build a new generation of managed WordPress hosting in production environments even prior to the stable release!

SolusIO simply would not be where it is today without your feedback, suggestions, and contributions. Within this community, SolusIO has already been deployed a few thousand times among the 500+ beta testers. We can’t thank our community enough and are looking forward to working with each and every one of you as we continue to improve and shape SolusIO into the best in-house virtualization and cloud hosting solution.

In this blog post, we’re providing an overview of what we have built by explaining what problems SolusIO is designed to solve, how partners are using it in practice, why users find it to be uniquely suited for their application stack, and how we plan to continue development post v1.1.

Before we describe the features one by one, take the time to view this quick intro video:

The Problem SolusIO solves

SolusIO is a complete and turn-key Virtual Infrastructure Management solution. As organizations start to virtualize servers in production, the immediate challenge becomes the reduction of large collections of cost categories.

As illustrated in the following figure, SolusIO solves problems spanning across managed hosting services, application & CMS management, as well as provisioning virtual servers, straight from billing & automation platforms like WHMCS.

SolusIO streamlines the management and scaling of IT infrastructures via seamless integration of WHMCS, Plesk, cPanel, or WordPress. Complex administrative tasks are simplified with smart wizards and a set of automation tools that provide administrators the most efficient path to application delivery, freeing them from lengthy and repetitive jobs.

SolusIO’s single license model offers access to fully-fledged capabilities, providing enterprise-range features such as Application Management and Self-service control panel with Cloud-init support, Intelligent backups, User management, DNS management, as well as Billing system integration, and 24/7 customer support. As one license contains all the features, it eliminates the complexity of evaluating which license best suits your business needs today and your future expansion plans.

The result is a complete platform that ensures a remarkable developer and operator experience. With SolusIO, organizations no longer need to worry about keeping up with and integrating a myriad of technologies from the fast-moving cloud ecosystem. Instead, they deploy SolusIO once and can then focus on developing the applications and managed services that make their business better.

How Organizations Leverage SolusIO: NetNation Pilot Project

NetNation owns six leading web hosting and managed applications brands (Gate.com, Hostway, HostMySite, myhosting.com, SolVPS, and DomainPeople), and also acts as a leading provider of white-label web service solutions. They accessed Solus.IO’s partnership to create a virtualization infrastructure solution as the core of its next Managed WordPress Hosting product.

NetNation’s goals were two-fold: through virtualization, build a new generation of Managed WordPress, and second, decreasing the time required to bring new managed services to market.

The result of the project exceeded by far NetNation’s expectations. As a result of SolusIO’s virtualization capabilities, NetNation experienced significant hardware, software, and operational cost reductions, thus helping the company become more agile and responsive to internal business unit needs across the company.

In addition to significant cost-savings, NetNation dramatically decreased its time required to deliver new nodes internally, allowing for new virtual machines to be stood up within minutes of internal sign-off. This allowed NetNation to greatly improve their testing and development environment capabilities, as well as their Disaster Recovery abilities.

Integrations with WHMCS and Plesk

Key to SolusIO’s work with NetNation was their ability to integrate seamlessly with WHMCS and Plesk.

• SolusIO’s WHMCS module allows for NetNation to create, destroy, suspend, unsuspend, upgrade, downgrade, reboot, boot, and shutdown customer virtual servers – as well as the ability to provision virtual servers in different locations – all directly from a WHMCS dashboard.
• Plesk’s extensions, including WordPress Toolkit, SpeedKit, and Imunify360, eased the workload of NetNation’s Internal Development team, dramatically decreasing the time required to launch its new Managed WordPress product.

Moving Forward

NetNation is investigating the rest of its infrastructure to see where SolusIO can help its server consolidation efforts. Moving forward, NetNation is excited to further grow its relationship with SolusIO as its infrastructure virtualization management partner.

Why SolusIO is unique

We set out to build SolusIO because we saw the need for a complete turn-key virtual infrastructure management platform. The resulting product, SolusIO, has a number of unique qualities:

• Self-Service Control Panel
  
  In today’s world, self-service is everything, and we believe it’s the key to success, not just for you, but for your customers as well. Allowing your customers the flexibility to create virtual servers on-demand is mandatory in this day and age.

• Easy to Use
  
  Time and time again, developers have told us they love SolusIO’s simple and intuitive experience which enables them to focus on building applications as opposed to having to build the underlying infrastructure software themselves.

• Enterprise Grade
  
  SolusIO is the only virtual infrastructure management platform today with native integration with Plesk, cPanel, and WHMCS. Additionally, SolusIO implements enterprise management features such as intelligent backups, smart updates powered by AI, predefined applications, and a unified application catalog.

• WHMCS Integration
  
  A keen eye for WHMCS capabilities is one of SolusIO’s main benefits. SolusIO Release v.1.2 will come with a turnkey solution, meaning a ready-to-use WHMCS integration!

• WHMCS provisioning module
• WHMCS billing module

This allows you to create, destroy, suspend, unsuspend, upgrade, downgrade, reboot, boot, and shutdown virtual servers, plus functions to provision virtual servers in different locations, all directly from within WHMCS. It will also be possible to create a range of reseller resource products with orders being instantly auto-provisioned on payment, for example.

• Support for Managed Services
  
  SolusIO helps agencies and businesses build and manage web apps like WordPress more collaboratively and efficiently. Adding the Plesk management layer to hosting services or managed WordPress offering helps grow beyond unmanaged services.This is why SolusIO comes with a ready-to-use and fully tuned WordPress integration. Customers can create and manage WordPress sites easily, but always securely, and conveniently directly from the SolusIO dashboard.

What You Can Expect after 1.1

We will continue to improve backup and storage features, implement richer enterprise-grade visibility and control features, onboard and certify more application catalog entries, provide migration tools, and support additional billing solutions. Moreover, we are also planning to integrate a free-trial process in our marketing efforts.

You can get a good idea of what users community members want by looking at the Feature Requests – and of course, please contribute yourself.

Ubuntu 20.04 support

Ubuntu 20.04 added now fully supported to create Virtual Servers and install compute resources on it.

Icons Management

Out of the box, SolusIO provides a lot of icons for many cases.

The SolusIO administrator can manage icons for applications, operating systems, and locations via admin UI.

Admins can set their own icon for applications, operating systems, and location.

Available Soon

Supporting several additional languages.

Ability to reinstall virtual servers.

Free Online Webinar

To see SolusIO in action, you can also join our free online webinar on building your own virtualization platform with SolusIO, starting May 20th.

With version 1.1 behind us, new features will become available at a much faster pace. If you want to upgrade from SolusVM version to SolusIO release v1.1, our sales team is at your disposal.

Stay tuned!