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Managed Hosting - Overview

Managed Hosting offers an ideal solution for companies and enterprises that require a high availability environment for their business-critical websites or applications. It is also a popular solution for companies that want to outsource and consolidate "dusty servers in the basement" to a Managed Hosting solution.

Managed Hosting Platforms

Managed Hosting can be delivered using either a traditional hard disk platform or a virtual storage area network (SAN)-based solution. Ultraspeed has adopted the SAN method for good reason.

Managed Hosting solutions, based on the traditional method, involves each server having its own hard drive, or array of hard drives, on which data is stored. However, through experience, Ultraspeed recognised a number of disadvantages of using this method:

• There is a physical process required for replacing the failed hard drive(s) in a disk-based server. Even if an engineer is present onsite, this process can take hours. In the meantime, the server and potentially the Managed Hosting solution are down and not available.
• After a hard drive(s) failure, the server has to be reloaded with the operating system and the data (assuming the data is backed up off-server). Again this can take hours or even days.
• Local hard drive performance can be quite slow where websites/applications have high disk I/O requirements. Ultraspeed has resolved these issues and targeted 100% uptime with its successful alternative, known as Diskless Servers.

Ultraspeed has resolved these issues and targeted 100% uptime with its successful alternative, known as Diskless Server.

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Ultraspeed Diskless Servers

Ultraspeed combines a number of technologies with SANs (commonly used across the world in large enterprises and government organisations) to produce the unique Diskless Servers, which provide the resilience, security and high availability demanded by companies of all sizes. Ultraspeed's unique approach means that customers get enterprise-level reliability and service at a very competitive price.

Key facts:

• 15-minute hardware replacement guarantee in the event of server hardware failure
• Virtualisation software (VMWare) is used as one of the technology components within Diskless
• Enterprise SANs are used within Diskless
• All data for each server within a customer's Managed Hosting solution is stored on Ultraspeed's SANs
• No data is stored locally on individual servers
• Live data stored on Ultraspeed's SAN is housed on extremely fast
• Fibre Channel hard drives, and data is stored in small chunks across many disks (minimum equivalent to RAID-5)
• Ultraspeed does a complete snapshot of each server's data on a nightly basis, and stores 32 days worth of historical snapshots
• Datacentre, on a weekly basis for Disaster Recovery purposes. This can be upgraded to daily, on request

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Ultraspeed Managed Hosting Options

Ultraspeed has carefully crafted two distinct products to serve the demands of different types and size of customer. Every customer is looked after throughout the pre-sales and post-sales process by a highly experienced Ultraspeed systems engineer, who is responsible for producing a bespoke design for each customer environment. The customer sign-off of the design is part of the approval process that all environments must go through before progressing to provisioning by Ultraspeed.

Simple

Diskless Simple is for customers who want to leverage Ultraspeed's Diskless platform but only require a few servers to service their requirement. It provides virtual servers provisioned across a shared hardware pool (with guaranteed resources), as well as access to Ultraspeed's advanced services such as Managed Firewall and Managed Load Balancing.

Infrastructure

For customers who have more complex requirements, Diskless Infrastructure is based on the concept of dedicated physical servers with virtual servers provisioned across these in a carefully designed configuration. Customers using Diskless Infrastructure have more flexibility in terms of increasing CPU and RAM resources assigned to individual servers, as well as the ability to set rules on what virtual server should live on what physical server.

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