When we talk about local storage, we’re referring to disk drives that are physically attached to a computer or server. At minimum, this will contain the operating system and other software needed for the server to perform its desired functions. For companies just beginning to build a web presence, their local storage drives might also contain their web site files, databases, images, and other information, but as the website and applications grow this will cause scalability issues. When this occurs, the solution is to offload data storage from the server. The two technologies that are most common in the industry are NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Networks), approaches that seem similar but server very different purposes.

NAS allows an administrator to attach a disk drive (or disk array) to a server through network communication protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP and file system protocols like NFS. To the host system, the new storage space appears as an additional lettered drive. This solution is very popular for smaller home and office networks, offering a ‘plug and play’ solution for data storage and backups. Beyond a certain point, NAS will also suffer from scalability issues, and in high traffic situations performance becomes a concern.

SAN solutions use high speed Fibre Channel SCSI interfaces to attach RAID disk arrays to servers. The host sees a series of virtual disk drives, but the key difference is that these drives are viewed as locally attached devices, and system addressing is done at the disk block level, versus at the file level for NAS devices. This creates huge performance gains in environments that handle millions of transactions daily. It also allows for much faster and more thorough disaster recovery efforts, mitigating hardware dependencies through RAID and virtualization technologies.

Neither NAS nor SAN should be confused with an effective data backup solution, which may use one or the other or a different technology altogether. Your local storage and network storage are key components in your back up procedure, in the same sense that a weight bench or treadmill are important parts of a fitness routine, but they are not solutions in and of themselves.

Whether you are in the planning stages of your business web and application hosting services or are operating an established deployment, success will mean making smart decisions on how and where to use storage technologies to your best advantage. By understanding the roles of local storage, NAS/SAN, and how they integrate with your broader data backup and protection solutions, you can both secure critical business information and improve the overall user experience for customers and employees that interact with your website and hosted applications.

A CDN (Content Distribution Network) works under a simple but effective premise, tried and true by its retail distribution cousin- speed up deliveries by putting products, or in our this case digital content, closer to customers. Amazon is a textbook example of how this works, no pun intended. From their humble beginnings in Seattle, Amazon now has distribution centers around the globe, stocking popular items and allowing for fast deliver to shoppers. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but over time it provides a notable savings in fulfillment costs.

Digital content distribution can benefit from the same model. Rather than putting a file on a server and having users download it from a single source, CDN services intelligently push content to the edges of the network, where the end users are. Here’s why that’s important- just because the internet makes it easy for anyone to ‘virtually’ drive up to your office and pick up a brochure or a copy of a video, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in practice, especially when you can save the trip for a large number of those customers.

CDN saves time, because media and data files have a shorter distance to travel to reach the end user. In a world where we are bombarded with constant distractions, an extra 30 seconds on a download can be an eternity. Often, it can be the difference between someone staying on your site or going on to the next one.

CDN also saves money. Long haul bandwidth consumption is reduced, and network operations are simplified as compared to dealing with multiple carriers and the associated vendor relationship overhead. CDN adds stickiness to your site, increasing sales as well as revenue opportunities from ad networks and affiliate programs.

NaviSite CDN delivers 25% faster performance than our competitors CDN services. We know that an effective CDN solution is more than cache servers, and we also include the reporting features and version management tools you need. NaviSite CDN covers the entire content delivery chain, and is backed by 16 strategically located high performance data centers. By incorporating CDN into your network service offering, you improve the customer experience, cut costs, and protect other hosted services by offloading high traffic downloads from your primary application servers.

Easy Configuration – With AppCmd the new UI, plus centralized configuration, including delegation, Admins can now easily work with applicationhost.config and web.config files. IIS 7 now supports the flexibility and configuration needed to build complex, secure, and feature rich functionality. The new UI in IIS 7 makes it easier than ever to configure the Web server and Websites and applications on the server.

Performance – Optimized performance and resiliency. Several architectural improvements have been implemented in IIS 7 which enables better performance, throughput and in the case of PHP – outright seeped in execution.

Troubleshooting – With Failed Request Tracing administrators can peer into the web server and see detailed diagnostic information. With the Runtime Status & Control API (RSCA) administrators will be able to see what requests are executing in real-time.

SQL 2008 – The bulletproof, high-performance database is tightly integrated into IIS7 and the .NET environment making it easy to build dynamic Websites and Web applications.

Expression Studio & Web– Microsoft’s integrated toolset empowers Web professionals with an unprecedented environment making rich Websites possible with less code and less integration.

WebsiteSpark – Microsoft’s program for Web Professionals, offers free copies of Windows, Expression Studio and Web and SQL – for both development and managed dedicated hosting.

NaviSite can sponsor or nominate Web Design agencies and Web development firms into WebsiteSpark programs. NaviSite is an approved Microsoft WebsiteSpark Hosting Partner and works closely with Network Partners across the world. NaviSite’s 16 data centers and extensive managed hosting offerings and Microsoft Gold Certification with Hosting Competencies.

To understand the advantages of virtualization, consider what it takes to add capacity for a typical business office. Here’s the scenario- a wildly successful new product line forces a company to increase personnel by 50 people to handle the additional production volume. Assuming there is room to seat 50 new employees, a tremendous amount of physical infrastructure needs to be purchased, installed, and configured to varying degrees. Cubicles and desks built, phone and data lines run, computers need to be set up, it’s a long and expensive list, and it can take weeks or more to complete the project and put the new employees to work.

For many businesses, this growth can also force a physical relocation. While a measure of success, the prospect of moving to a larger facility often comes at the worst possible time in the lifecycle of a business, taking away focus that should be spent on capitalizing their successes. The successful company that fumbles during expansion is a common but nonetheless true business cliché.

Now imagine the same scenario, but instead of having to measure out floor plans and order desks and computers, you go to your web browser and fire up your MyOffice control panel. You go to the ‘Number of Employees’ field and change it from 100 to 150. You run through a series of check boxes, selecting such options as ’desktop or laptop’, ‘cubicle size’, ‘enable/disable voice mail’, and at the end you click ‘save’ and your new employees are ready to walk in and sit down to work. That’s the power of virtualization.

With NaviSite and VMware services, the emphasis changes from hardware to resources. With rare exceptions, businesses don’t want servers; they want applications to run, with optimal performance and security. In other words, they want resources. This resource based approach allows administrators to add processing capacity, system memory, storage space, and even server instances on the fly. This is incredibly valuable, giving business decision makers the ability to react to new trends and marketing initiatives with unprecedented speed. A new server can take weeks to purchase and install, but a new server instance can be spawned in seconds. It’s a tremendous advantage in a tough economy, slashing total cost of ownership and redefining the concept of rapid deployment.

Virtualization also dramatically reduces the security risks that come from the physical server model. Denial of Service attacks, intrusions, viruses and other malware are generally designed to exploit single points of failure, overwhelming specific interfaces or hardware and software resources. Virtualization effectively counters that by spreading resources out, reallocating them instantaneously and removing exploitable targets. For hackers, it becomes the equivalent of fighting a rainstorm with a baseball bat.

Concepts like Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing aren’t theoretical anymore, they are important aspects of any modern business plan, and virtualization puts businesses of any size in a position to win under this new set of ground rules. NaviSite’s VMware powered service offerings allow businesses to reap these benefits while eliminating the high costs and dangerous risks associated with archaic single server architectures.

Protecting your business data is more important than ever due to all the catastrophic, unforeseen events that can damage or destroy your data permanently. Customer data, accounts payable, invoices, email and historical communications and business applications are the backbone of your company. Without your business data, your business could not move forward on a day to day basis. Imagine not being able to access your business data for an hour, a day, a month or possibly forever. Now you can protect your small business from data loss, prevent unplanned downtime, and prevent business failure. NaviSite, a leading dedicated and managed hosting services company, shows you how vulnerable your data can be without the proper backup plan in place.

Please Click Here to access the complete White paper and Learn how you can protect your business and focus on what you do best

Depending on your point of view, you may focus on certain data center features when reviewing managed hosting and colocation providers. Some businesses are concerned with connectivity, others with environmental features, or physical security, or routing protocols; it’s a long and diverse list. At the heart of every individual concern is an overriding one and it’s the same for every business- uptime. As anyone who has spent time reading and evaluating service level guarantees (SLAs) knows, there are a lot of ways uptime can be defined.

Data center ratings ideally provide a standardized, industry accepted means to fairly and objectively review data centers, so customers can cut through the marketing hype and truly understand the differences when making important business decisions. In practice however, this hasn’t fully been the case.

Here’s the first problem- there are two different “industry standard” ratings systems, and likely more to come. SAS 70 Type I and II certifications refer to the rules followed by the Auditing Standards Board of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Originally used for auditing profit and loss statements for organizations and businesses, the IT dependencies of large financial institutions has led to SAS 70 audits being done on service providers as part of regulatory requirements. Successful completion of those audits was viewed as a market advantage, and today a relatively obscure finance term has become an advertising bullet point.

Parallel to this, a ratings system was developed by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and The Uptime Institute more specific to data center operations. They established a tier system that focuses largely on physical infrastructure, so for example a Tier 1 facility fulfills minimal operating data center infrastructure requirements, while a Tier 4 facility has fault tolerant redundancy. While there has been some debate on the methodology used, both the AICPA ratings system and the Uptime Institute’s Tier system provide solid yardsticks to measure the uptime and reliability of a data center. As Shakespeare put it, there’s the rub.

Data center uptime does not necessarily equal uptime for your Website or hosted applications. In real world business situations, your success isn’t dependent on having four identical routers on standby in the event of an equipment failure; it’s dependent on the live person who is on site ready to answer your call in the middle of the night. That’s the difference you get with NaviSite. We’ve covered the infrastructure bases, gotten the SAS 70 Type II certification, and built the N + 1 redundancy into our data centers. We consider that merely the groundwork. Just as a 5 star restaurant rating is no guarantee you’ll be satisfied with your meal, when you are evaluating potential managed hosting and colocation providers, data center ratings should just be one item on a long checklist. At NaviSite, our top rated data centers are just step one of our total commitment to your success.

One of the first places to focus on when developing a monitoring system is for server and process uptime. As most of us have experienced firsthand with home computers, the fact that the computer is up and operational is no guarantee that your desired program is running. Identify all the critical applications it takes to deliver your web site and other services. This would include your HTTP server software, DNS, inbound and outbound mail server applications, authentication servers, and anything else particular to your environment. Your process and uptime monitoring scheme should also include IPs for internal and external server interfaces, routers and switches, network attached storage devices, and any other important hardware with an interface reachable with PING or other network monitoring protocols.

It is helpful for administrators to have visibility into the other systems that deliver your web site and network applications, for example, temperature, humidity, and power in the operating environment where your infrastructure is deployed. If you have peering with multiple backbone providers, you’d want to know the health of those network connections. You’ll also want to monitor resources like processor overhead, memory usage, and available storage space. When it comes to monitoring, more is almost always better, and the information you gain from monitoring processes has a hidden value.

Typically, monitoring is used as an alarm system, reactive in nature. A server crashes, the monitor detects that it’s offline, and a series of notification events is subsequently triggered. That system is tried and true, but it misses a larger point- when used effectively, monitoring systems don’t alert in the event of downtime, they prevent the downtime from occurring in the first place. This is where the secret weapon comes in.

A good monitoring system generates a tremendous amount of valuable information that can be used for a variety of business planning purposes. Utilization numbers can be graphed to plan for infrastructure upgrades. Traffic numbers can be analyzed to help gauge the effectiveness of sales and marketing initiatives. These statistics can also come in handy when it’s time to negotiate service contracts, by understanding which providers carry the bulk of your customer traffic. The sum total of all this is a tremendous advantage when coordinating activities across different teams in your organization.

Here’s a real world example- your marketing group lands a featured role in a high profile event that will showcase your company to a new customer base. They confer with the IT group, who uses the information gleaned from monitoring processes to discover that projected upgrades will need to happen right around the same time as the scheduled event. The necessary upgrades are accelerated by several weeks, putting the company in an optimal position to make a strong impression. Without the advantage of a strong monitoring procedure, this was a potential disaster.

That’s the kind of monitoring edge you get included with all of NaviSite’s managed and dedicated hosting services. Our team of 24/7/365 Always There ™ engineers isn’t just watching for systems to fail, they are proactively monitoring to head off potential failures, ensuring your performance and availability. It’s just one more way that NaviSite is totally committed to your success.

Here’s the paradox- it doesn’t matter what product or services you sell, success in the 21st century marketplace is largely dependent on efficient and flexible IT solutions. The upshot of this is businesses have to make a choice- hire and train the personnel and acquire the hardware and bandwidth needed to deploy and manage all their IT needs in house, or outsource those needs to a quality application host. SMBs that don’t have money to burn smartly turn to outsourcing as the answer.

SaaS, or Software as a Service, takes an end user perspective on what software should accomplish and the best way to deliver on those requirements. To take a simplistic view- people don’t want to own word processing software, they want to create and edit documents. Purchasing and installing a word processing application (as well as the computer to run it on) are the steps needed to do that, and until recently that’s been the only option.

SaaS application hosting says that ownership isn’t the only option, and in most cases it’s not even a good option. Unless IT services are your core business function, you have highly trained personnel on staff, state of the art hardware and software that’s already purchased and licensed, ample network connectivity and a fully redundant datacenter to house everything, it’s virtually impossible to provide an acceptable level of those services without breaking the budget. Much more likely is the prospect of having an inferior IT deployment that decimates bottom line revenues, and which provides no competitive advantages.

When you outsource IT functions to a quality SaaS application hosting provider, you leverage significant economies of scale, and reap tremendous benefits as a result. It’s an easy list to fill out- eliminating CapEx for servers and related hardware, gaining 24/7/365 access to trained and certified engineers, and enjoying the performance and reliability of backbone connectivity and an environmentally secure, UPS backed datacenter just to name a few. SaaS application hosting also has a less obvious, but potentially more valuable benefit- an unprecedented level of control over IT costs.

The typical IT build/upgrade cycle looks like this- deploy more infrastructure than you need, grow into it, exceed capacity, repeat. It’s a model that’s been dictated by suppliers and accounting departments, not by business planners. It’s also terribly inefficient. At one end of the scale you are overpaying for your IT services, and at the other end you’re being poorly served. Both situations bleed away profits, and your business spends far too little time in the sweet spot of optimized price and service levels.

SaaS flips that scenario, allowing for true ‘pay as you go’ pricing, and ensuring that every dollar spent is contributing to the bottom line. Application deployments are truly scalable, and allow decision makers to get out of the cycle of overbuild and over utilize. If your business hasn’t already incorporated SaaS application hosting into your IT infrastructure, you are facing a serious and growing disadvantage. Take steps to fix that today, and learn how SaaS can boost profits and cut operating costs for your business.