The production cycle of a website typically looks something like this- a graphic artist designs a mockup of the site for the client to review. Once the client likes the visual look of the site, the coding team builds the website on a development server for testing, troubleshooting, and presentation to the client. After everything has the green light, an implementation team deploys a web server, configures it, and finally the site is moved over to the live production server and delivered to the client. Imagine how much easier this process could be if development and production tasks could be accomplished on the same platform and in a cost effective fashion? With a managed virtual dedicated server, this becomes a very viable option.
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From Presentation to Production: Putting Virtual Dedicated Servers to work for you
Thursday, March 26th, 2009 by William Toll
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 – Simplifies Server Management while Greatly Expanding Server Capabilities
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by William TollNaviSite is pleased to announce the availability of an updated version of Parallels Plesk Panel for our Managed Dedicated Server and Virtual Dedicated Server customers.Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has been the leading provider of control panels for both Liunx and Windows servers for several years.
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Online Storage Options – Affordable & Flexible
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 by William TollOver the years we have seen disk storage allotments increase dramatically with Web hosting plans. About 9 years ago a large shared hosting provider had a “leading storage allotment” of 150MB on their $19.95 plan. Back then 7,000MB of storage hardware would cost $60,000! With the digital revolution (audio, video, and images), the increasing size of databases and compliance needs driving record/log storage, many companies are in a situation where demand is beginning to outpace supply.
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2008: Looking Back at Small Business Hosting Purchases
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 by William TollSmall and medium-sized businesses found 2008 to be the year when many previously “leading edge” and “out of reach” technologies became accessible and, more importantly, critical to their bottom line. In 2008, SMB technology teams, ISVs, and IT consultants were transforming their technology deployments to hosting services utilizing formerly out-of-reach technologies.
For the first time, SMBs were benefiting from solutions and technologies such as Software as a Service, Quad-Core CPUs, Virtualization, and the new Microsoft server technologies.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the preferred method for SMBs to consume software to meet their application and business process needs. SMBs now clearly see that it no longer makes sense to buy software and hardware from traditional retailers and distributors. The VARs and MSPs that service SMBs have moved from break-fix agreements to recurring arrangements with their SMB customers. In 2008, SaaS became not only a viable option but in many ways the preferred solution. Large capital outlays on new hardware and the associated big expenses on installation and upgrade licenses are now seen as the not financially advisable and inefficient. Hosted dedicated servers and virtual dedicated servers enable SMBs and their VARs to quickly deploy new solutions and upgrades and save time and capital.
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RAID Explained & Why You Should Care
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 by William TollHard Disks have moving parts. Hard Disks fail. Hard Disk failures can result into data loss. Small businesses that loose data are at a greater risk of business failure and financial hardship. The hard disk industry knows this and a recent Carnegie Mellon University study looked at 100,000 hard drives and reached to the conclusion that hard drive manufacturers were exaggerating their meantime before failure (MTBF) rates by 15%. NaviSite strongly encourages businesses to seek solutions and providers that encourage the greater use of technologies like RAID.
Let’s discuss RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) which, when implemented, can significantly increase a server’s reliability and performance while decreasing risk by an order of magnitude.
There are several methods of implementing RAID on a server – some software based and some hardware based. It is widely accepted that hardware RAID is preferred as it is more reliable and requires less CPU cycles to be implemented. RAID uses a significant amount of computation processing while reading and writing information. All NaviSite Dedicated Hosting servers include standard hardware RAID.
RAID Levels are an important concept. The more hard drives that are in a server – will enable additional RAID options. The widely used RAID levels include RAID 0, 1, 5, 10. There are also variants of these core RAID levels. Let’s look closely at RAID 1, 5, 10 – the three most popular and widely deployed:
RAID 1 – often referred to as “Mirrored Disks” can be considered by many to be a backup solution. RAID 1 requires two hard drives which store the same data.
RAID 5 – often considered the first step to redundancy includes three or more disks that are “striped with parity” and protects data against the loss of any single disk.
RAID 10 – aka (1+0) requires four or more drives and has the benefits of both striping and mirroring.
In brief, the more disks a server has, the more likely there is “mirroring and striping” with these disks. Mirroring is the process of copying data to more than one disk. Striping is “splitting data across more than one disk.” Striping can increase performance as data that is requested by the server and application will be processed more quickly as it is coming from two drives instead of one.
Important concepts to consider – data that is written to a RAID disk set is written and protected on multiple drives – however that data may be corrupt or incorrect. RAID does not replace a proper backup solution.
RAID should be a ‘must have’ on your list for a dedicated server – it provides better Data Security, Fault Tolerance, Improved Availability and with striping – Improved Performance. NaviSite Dedicated Hosting includes RAID 1 as standard on all servers with RAID 5 being standard on servers with more than 2 hard drives. RAID 10 is available on servers that support four or more hard drives.
An Insight into Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) vs. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Thursday, October 9th, 2008 by William TollOver the past few years, the computing and uptime needs for the SMBs have increased steadily as they have becoming increasingly dependent on their technology infrastructure for both top line growth and bottom line results. In the mid of 2000, many companies grew out of shared Web hosting because of their need for more power, and control at an affordable price. A new technology began to gain some traction – Virtual Private Servers or VPS in short. This was a natural progression from the low-end shared hosting packages, empowering businesses with more control on their environment while still retaining some of the advantages of a shared hosting platform including a common operating system, ability to run applications with root access in a well defined logical container. Parallels’ (previously known as SWsoft) Virtuozzo quickly established itself as the leader in the virtualization platform and today has millions of VMs active around the world that many hosting providers launched their VPS offerings on top-of. These VPSs are typically offered at a monthly price point in the sub $100 range.
SMBs demand for increased reliability, security and computing led to the emergence of a new breed of virtualization technology called Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS). VDS is built upon an enterprise technology dubbed as the ‘hypervisor.’ This enables the SMBs to have greater control and flexibility by providing each VDS machine with a dedicated OS instance, thereby eliminating the security and stability issues that come with a typical VPS setup. The picture below helps explain the fundamental architecture difference between the two technologies – VPS and VDS.
What does this mean? For businesses with an aim to manage all aspects of their environment, having a dedicated OS instance become essential. This is especially the case for businesses that rely on their underlying platform for transactions and revenue, and need to achieve certain regulatory and compliance certifications around their technology infrastructure which require having full control of the underlying operating system.
NaviSite’s Dedicated Hosting solutions offer VDS solutions that are based on this next generation of hypervisor technology from VMware. VMware ESX Infrastructure is much more robust technology trusted the world over to enable virtualization. This offering was designed keeping the expanding security, reliability and performance expectations of the SMBs customer in mind. These packages are incrementally more costly than VPS but offer a much higher level of computing power, reliability and security. This can be attributed to a lower density of virtual machines per server, an enterprise grade utility platform powered by HP blade servers with dozens of processors and RAM chips. Each VDS comes bundled with truly scalable storage using EMC’s enterprise SAN technology.
