This week Microsoft released a patch for their hardware virtualisation platform, Hyper-V, that was highly recommended. It was the first patch of its kind in the 2 years that this technology has been publicly available. It was important enough for us to bypass our normal patch change control process – we take matters of security and stability very seriously. read more
Part 2: The C Infinity Private Cloud VS the Rest
In the first post in this article we looked at how you could get high levels of hardware fault tolerance with a “statefull” application such as a database and how it was very expensive. In this post we will look at how the C Infinity private cloud can get the same results at a fraction of the cost and with greater functionality.
Part 1: The C Infinity Private Cloud VS the Rest
I don’t blame anyone for being confused about the server hosting options that are out there. It makes picking a mobile phone billing plan or reading a constitutional amendment look easy. I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain what some of the options are in the market and compare them with the C Infinity private cloud.
74% of IT Workers Should Look To the Cloud
ZDNet published results from a survey that showed 74% of IT workers are using at least 3 machines to do their day-to-day jobs. What’s really scary is that this doesn’t include servers that they are working on or PC’s that they are fixing. What’s going on is that testers need multiple test environments for various scenarios, developers need custom work environments and IT pro’s need to work in isolated environments or be able to manage many operating systems. This needs have evolved over time and the infrastructure required has grown organically until it gets to the point that there’s a huge environment that resides outside of the normal management systems.
Managed Server Hosting Availability Reports
We’ve been talking a lot about SLA’s (Service Level Agreements) in the hosting industry at work lately. As a hosting company, like any other company, you’re dependant on many things:
- Power and Cooling: Our data centre provides and lives up to their 100% SLA with a dedicated substation and dual diesel generators. No outages since 2001 is a nice way to live up to a promise!
- Internet connectivity: Again, we’re looking at a 100% SLA from our suppliers. That’s an enviable position; something you don’t get with a DSL or ordinary leased line. We monitor that closely and there’s been no outages yet.
- Server Uptime: This one completely depends on manufacturer reliability, clustering, etc.
The Future Of Windows Server
The next release of Windows Server will be in 2010 or thereabouts. This will probably be soon after the release of Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista. This new server product will be called Windows Server 2008 R2.
SAP Supports Hyper-V
SAP announced that their product range will now support being installed onto a Hyper-V virtualised platform. This support is available from version 6.40 and higher. This opens up the virtualised platform to another enterprise platform – and it opens up being hosted in an economic and managed online environment such as C Infinity’s virtual server solution.
