Mar
26
2009

From Presentation to Production: Putting Virtual Dedicated Servers to work for you

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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Oct
9
2008

An Insight into Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) vs. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Over 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.

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