A few days ago, The VAR Guy openly wondered how CloudLinux OS — a new Linux distribution designed for hosting providers — hopes to stand out in a market dominated by Red Hat, Novell and several other emerging options. Today, The VAR Guy got some answers from Igor Seletskiy, founder and CEO of Cloud Linux Inc. Here’s what he had to say.

During a meeting at Parallels Summit, Seletskiy described how CloudLinux OS is designed with multi-tenant users in mind. “In shared environments, each new customer adds more risk on the server,” Seletskiy notes. If one application demands too many CPU resources, he notes, the other customers on the same server can suffer from degrading performance.

To overcome that challenge, CloudLinux OS leverages Lightweight Virtual Environments (LVE), which allows Web hosting providers to allocate specific CPU capabilities to each application. The result: If one web site or application suffers from a traffic spike, all of the other applications on the same server cluster are still protected and perform as desired. 

Seletskiy claims neither Red Hat nor Novell have focused on such multi-tenant capabilities because both companies mainly target enterprise customers. Hmmm… The VAR Guy doesn’t have the technical expertise to confirm or dismiss Seletskiy’s point. But our resident blogger will check in with the other Linux providers for their thoughts.

In the meantime, Seletskiy says CloudLinux OS can run applications designed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS (the community version of Red Hat).