In a world of unlimited resources, it would be great to toss up a brand new server every time you made a pitch to a prospective client. Unfortunately we don’t live in a world of unlimited resources, in fact the opposite is true and cutting costs is the order of the day. By using managed virtual dedicated servers as a development and presentation tool, web designers can impress clients with the look and feel of their actual site right from the first review session, and without the cost of expensive hardware.

With the advances made in processor technology, it’s now possible to run multiple server instances on the same physical hardware. For most standard websites with minimal computing overhead, this means a significant cost reduction while maintain the same functionality of a traditional server. More importantly, for web development companies this means instantaneous deployment. The client is live with a mouse click.

The immediacy of managed virtual dedicated servers becomes a benefit from the very beginning of the sales process. Client presentations are made on the exact same environment that the production website will live on, so you don’t have to explain things like “it won’t be quite like this once we’re outside of the firewall” or “this should have been the right password, let me call the office and see what’s wrong.” Virtual dedicated servers are generally up and running within minutes, allowing developers maximum flexibility.

Another added benefit in using managed virtual dedicated servers in a development environment is platform independence. Available in both Linux and Windows operating systems, developers aren’t hamstrung by hardware dependencies, and can instead take advantage of the strengths of each environment. Leverage the ‘managed’ aspect of managed virtual dedicated servers, and you don’t need to have Red Hat experts alongside MCSE’s just to keep your infrastructure running. That’s what the provider is for.

Used creatively, managed virtual dedicated servers can be a tremendous aide to web development teams, and provide a host of direct and indirect benefits. Add immediacy to initial client presentations, streamline the development process, make deployment seamless, and do it all with a cost effective, user friendly turnkey solution.

Adding Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 to a server simplifies configuration, management and server administration to a great degree- enabling non-technical users the ability to control a server like never before.With it’s improved browser based interface administrators can easily enable a server to securely be a Web server, email server, database server, FTP server DNS server and more. Without Parallels Plesk Panel many of these server roles were difficult to install, configure and operate.

A Linux or Windows server from NaviSite with Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 is the perfect solution for advertising companies, Web designers, small business IT administrators and others who simply, need to focus on getting their or their clients business online. Today businesses of all sizes are utilizing the Web to manage their Internet presence and email communications and much more.

Today a Web presence requires Blogs, Communities, Content Management Systems, Online Chat, Online Help Desk software and much more. With Parallels Plesk Power Pack server administrators can easily install these applications and more. Previously Website features like these were difficult and costly to add to a Website – now with Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 and Parallels Plesk Power Pack they are a few clicks away. Some of the sample applications include Mambo, Joomla!, Coppermine, phpBB, post-Nuke, osCommerce, WordPress, and many more.

NaviSite Dedicated Hosting solutions can be configured with several different technologies to increase the storage available. Options include scalable SAN (Storage Area Network) solutions available with Virtual Dedicated Servers The SAN solution provides enterprise class redundancy on hardware valued at hundreds of thousands.

Our Dedicated Servers, are available with additional local storage options as well. All of our hard drives are Seagate server grade drives and are either SATA or SAS based. Depending on the server additional storage options include 500GB drives and up-to six 146GB SAS drives which spin at 10,000 RPM.

NaviSite’s Managed Dedicated Servers also include an option for NAS (Network Attached Storage), which we can easily scale to 4,000GB.NAS is a great option, as both Linux and Windows “see” the storage as an additional drive letter. NaviSite’s NAS storage is built on hardware from HP and supports: NFS, FTP and HTTP and more. It’s a great solution with an incredible amount of flexibility.
Recently we met with a customer who we are implementing a solution for and it was great to see how well they planned for future storage needs.  Customers are finding a NaviSite Managed Virtual Dedicated Server with SAN storage or a Managed Dedicated Server with NAS storage options as affordable and flexible enough to meet their disk based online storage needs for today and tomorrow.

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.

Intel’s Xeon Quad-Core processors became the mainstream CPUs that small and medium sized businesses and their VARs chose to deploy their new applications and services on.  With more and more support for multi-core CPUs by operating systems and applications, and the decreasing costs for these processors, they became the default configuration.  In 2008, with dedicated servers running Quad-Core CPUs, SMBs are were harnessing an incredible amount of computing power.

2008 also saw virtualization technology transition from being either a low-end solution or big corporate technology.  On the low end, non-hypervisor based VPS hosting solutions were being outgrown by early adopters while on the high-end VMware’s ESX became an affordable and viable solution that SMBs could implement quickly and with a tremendous amount of flexibility.

Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008 technologies were released and are quickly becoming relevant to SMBs and the architects responsible for selecting platforms.  With IIS 7, Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft Expression tools being in their second generation, Microsoft has a compelling end-to-end platform that offers the best of open source and Microsoft’s traditional strengths.  Dedicated servers with Windows Server 2008 Web, Data Center, Standard or Enterprise versions are affordable and ready for tomorrow.

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.

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.