In the past three years, at Austin City service provider of online services arrangements HotSchedules.com Inc.'s Annual sales growth rate of more than 100%, the business prosperity so that they decided to spend 60 thousand U.S. dollars to buy a server hardware devices.
So far HotSchedules.com has been in the network to constantly expand De Ti Gong support, improve internal server security and efforts to nearly 375,000 customers to maximize the normal Gongzuoshijian, Tongshiyezai compression hardware expenditures and find ways to stabilize Dianlichengben.
Solution is virtualization, the growing popularity of this technology can help companies with limited resources to reduce server hardware capital expenditures. In essence, virtualization technology allows companies to integrate their internal server hardware as less of a software layer. This streamlining of dozens of servers is also saving money and area.
But virtualization is not HotSchedules.com computing capacity to enhance their first choice. Looking back in 1999, HotSchedules.com company to pay a monthly fee of way lease from a third party provider server capacity and storage systems - which is now commonly known as cloud computing industry. However, lack of customer service, installation costs and limited computing power to promote the company finally decided to deploy virtualization.
HotSchedules.com's chief technology officer Matt. Wu Ding said, "our company is configured with two servers and some memory, but this is all we get. We can get the customer service is very limited, it is definitely not the best experience. "
Companies such as HotSchedules.com soon find there is no way a move can be the hot topic, not all of the methods can also improve server and storage capacity. Some people doubt that the need for expensive virtualization expertise and stronger security as a guarantee. Cloud computing other fans who are on the scalability of cloud computing are pushing the same time, some people question its overall reliability.
Even those first-tier makers touted advantage of cost savings have also sparked a lively discussion. In March 2009 by the McKinsey & Co. Consulting report on the results of a controversial research, said, for large enterprises, IT workload will be moved to the cloud than the higher cost of using an internal hardware system reliability lower.
How to determine enterprise virtualization and cloud computing for enterprises that demand is better?
Washington, DC, the Executive Committee of the infrastructure company belongs to the Executive Committee, said project manager Mark Tonsetic, the key is to project itself as the basis for selection, according to the characteristics of applications supported by the data or make judgments. He added, "Each program should use the cover server workload demand and disaster recovery needs, and companies involved in security risk and the criteria for assessment."
In HotSchedules.com cases, the decisive factor is to maintain the sustainable development needs while reducing associated costs. In signing major new customers, the company realized that they must purchase worth 60,000 U.S. dollars in server hardware, data centers will double the size in order to meet the dramatic increase in large-scale chain restaurants computing needs.
Wu Ding said "This is a huge expenditure, so I think there are better ways to meet the requirements."
Since last year, equipped with Microsoft's Hyper-V management procedures, HotSchedules.com will integrate 42 physical servers to four. HotSchedules.com CEO Ray Pawlikowski said that computing power increases 10 times, thus no need to increase the monthly spending will host a large number of users. For example, the company's average monthly expenditure of 12,000 U.S. dollars of electricity, Pawlikowski is estimated to increase if the new data center servers, the monthly electricity costs will soar to 20,000.
Scalability issues
Cloud computing may be lower based on the proportion of packaging provided, but warned Wu Ding "Once you start to increase in accordance with customer requirements to those fancy components, price of the scope of a disability." More complex features such schedule that includes iPhone software, automation English - Spanish telephone service and instant notification of changes to conventional configuration.
But the external cloud service for those who do not intend to keep pace with data growth is a good thing for businesses.
FreshBooks is located in Toronto 2ndSITe Inc. Company online invoicing and time tracking of the department. CEO Mike McDerment said they were close to 1 million users not only to rent photo, logo and design of electronic forms of storage, but also a large number of infrastructure management deal with the thorny issue. He knew that expanding FreshBooks small business server to meet the storage needs of the user base will only lead to instability problems. So they from Rackspace US Inc. Ordered Cloud Files service.
McDerment explained, "Although we are a leading technology-based companies, but the rapid expansion of large-scale data is not the core of our business. Storage of these documents is time-consuming and labor-intensive work. Rackspace break out of these workloads, we then can concentrate on the compiled application software. "
FreshBooks by file storage and management of low-risk applications using cloud computing's attempts to enjoy the benefits of cloud computing, and the power they have not encountered the problems or technical confusion. After all has been much criticized for the cloud service interruption from the start tortured. This is why McDerment advantage of this technique to measure the time the reasons for such caution.
McDerment said, "People must open their eyes wide Q clearly 'cloud computing can support our company's core services, 45-minute downtime is acceptable?'."
Bill. Gilles is Israel Deaconess Medical Center out-patient services application software experience, he occasionally cloud service interruption that is their center can not afford. Teaching hospital in Boston, recently deployed from the virtualization giant, VMware's virtualization technology. This makes Massachusetts more than 200 physicians in private practice who can access electronic medical records. High confidentiality of medical data the nature of Gilles that this choice is wise.
"Since these are patient records, we hope to have the information stored in their own space. Of course, you can sign your request with the vendor confidentiality agreements, but it is still a risk. If the vendor center employee misconduct will be pregnant with all of our AIDS patient data sold to certain medical research organizations, we will have to bear joint responsibility for violation of safety protocols, and there is no recourse. At least use virtualization, this is our own staff, we have the data. "
Finally, select the cloud computing or virtualization needs assessment depends on your current and future development. After all, enterprise computing power and storage capacity must progress together with the expansion of the business. Tonsetic that "in the current environment, capital is very precious, and companies must look very carefully for the next two to three years computing power requirements, and thereby to Panduan their 今天 investment decisions made would be the right 的".