Private Cloud Hosting
Bespoke Virtualisation Solutions
Increasingly companies are looking to take advantage of 'cloud' services using virtualisation technology.
Virtualisation allows multiple virtual servers to run on a physical server and has the following technical advantages:
- Multiple servers for the price of one.
- Increased server performance, as refreshing to current hardware often provides 4-5 times the processing power compared to previous generations of similar server models
- Portability. A virtualised server being abstracted from the physical hardware layer is very easily ported between different physical servers.
- Scalability. Resources such as memory and CPU can be weighted and reassigned to servers which need more resources
- High availability at server level. Automatic failover of servers when physical servers fail.
- Ease of deployment for production applications
- Ease of deployment and roll-back of staging servers
- Ease of backups
- Standardisation of builds
- Hardware independence
- Disaster recovery
- Energy efficiency
Secure Private Clouds
A secure private cloud provides a single client with their own "cloud" utilising dedicated equipment in our datacentre, providing all of the above virtualisation benefits secured behind dedicated firewalls.
An example small deployment would be:
- 2 x Cisco ASA firewall pair
- 2 x Cisco 2960 gigagbit layer-2 switch
- 4 x Dedicated Servers running VMware vSphere
- 1 x Dedicated Server running vCenter
- 1 or 2 Iscsi Storage Area Networks (SANs) each with dual adaptors
The dedicated servers would be virtualised to provide multiple servers for the following purposes:
- 2 x load balancers
- Multiple front end web or application servers
- 2 x Database servers
- Active Directory server (Microsoft deployments)
Larger deployments might run to dozens of servers. It is not uncommon to shrink racks of physical servers by a factor of 80% when moving to a virtualised environment.
Security
Security of client data is achieved by:
- Physical Datacentre security
- Hardware is dedicated to client use, not shared with other clients
- Virtual servers each have a full independent operating system instance (Windows or Linux) and are isolated from one another
- Cisco ASA firewalls
- Firewall Demilitarised Zones (DMZs) ensuring that Internet access is limited to services such as web applications that need to be exposed to the Internet
- Private backend networks, for example having database virtualised servers
- VLAN trunks between virtual servers
- Server administration via secure Windows remote desktop or SSH
- Secure VPN access, including options for web SSL VPN, permanent VPNs to your office firewall and use of authentication devices for laptop access.
Scalability
To meet the needs of peak demands memory and CPU resources can be re-allocated between virtual servers on-the-fly using a management interface.
Hardware
We utilise HP servers, typically DL380p Gen8 series.
iSCSI or Fiber Channel SANs will typically be HP or Dell EqualLogic.
Software Licensing
For Microsoft deployments it is important that Windows and MS SQL are licensed properly for a virtualised environment. Xtraordinary can rent use of Microsoft licenses on a Monthly basis under the Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA).
Rental of VMware can be arranged on an attractive basis compared to outright purchase of perpetual licenses.
Support
Xtraordinary manages the maintenance and management of the hardware and virtualisation layers - we pro-actively repair server hardware and troubleshoot issues with the VMware virtualisation software.
Experience
Xtraordinary has been in business 11 years, with 7 years solid experience providing hundreds of virtualised environments in production service with a strong track record of uptime and reliability.
Custom Advice
Please contact Ivan Groenewald on 0800 781 6061, use our contact form or email sales @ xtrahost.co.uk to discuss your private cloud requirements. We can provide detailed proposals and specific technical advice based on our experience, free of "cloud hyperbole".
We can provide private clouds ranging from a single virtualised dedicated servers through to complex server farms spanning multiple datacentres.
