New cloud hosting and services support

06 Nov 2008

Over recent months, OPSC Limited has been involved in the trialing of the two leading cloud technologies with a view of providing next generation hosting packages at very cost effective rates.

We are now able to provide hosting and support for two cloud computing platforms.

Benefits of cloud computing over traditional hosting

Traditionaly, websites, applications and services are hosted on physical servers which has always come with a number of drawbacks.

• Physical servers are less scalable. If the need arises to increase the memory capacity, processor speed or other physical hardware such as storage the server will have to be taken offline for the upgrade work to be carried out.
• This is both inconvenient for clients, high risk and potentially expensive.
• Adding servers or changing server configurations requires new physical hardware to be added which takes time and additional cost.
• Physical servers carry higher risks when it comes to storage since a single server can lead to a single point of failure. Often websites and data are stored on a single server so if that server fails it can lead to loss of data and downtime while a new server is sourced and backed up data is restored.

Cloud computing resolves these and other issues by migrating hosting and storage into resilient, reliable and highly scalable virtual server networks known as clouds.

These clouds allow for hosting to be scaled up and down dynamically with no need for server downtime while data is automatically mirrored and secured in safe virtual networks.

The two platforms supported by OPSC Limited are Amazon's EC2 elastic cloud and Microsofts new Azure cloud.

Amazon EC2 cloud.

Amazon EC2 removes the limitations of physical servers by providing remotely managed virtual servers within Amazon's EC2 cloud.

This allows us to provide next generation hosting with all the benefits of a dedicated server but without the costs and limitations that come with physical servers.

A new virtual server alongside Amazon's own servers can be created in minutes giving all the performance and security benefits of Amazons own server network.

Users can then remote desktop onto the virtual servers to install websites, services and software or even create virtual networks with load balancing server machines.

Charging is calculated per hour based on the OS being used on the virtual server, bandwidth and storage requirements.

This gives the flexibility to run a single server with less storage and then increasing that storage and number of concurrent servers in the future as required without the need to take the first server down and again within minutes using remote access.

Microsoft's Azure platform

Microsoft's new cloud solution is called Azure and is set to radically change the web services and applications are hosted and delivered to client PC's as well as radically change users interact with their desktop PC's from Windows 7 onwards.

Azure is still only available for developer testing but is expected to be rolled out for live useage during 2009.

Our involvement in the developer test program allows us to offer early solutions in preperation for the eventual launch of Azure.

Azure is the next generation of cloud platform which moves away from the idea of seperate virtual servers.

Web applications, sites and services including SQL, Live and web services are developed in Windows Azure and are published into the cloud.

Unlike Amazon's EC2, theres no need to grab virtual servers or manage load balancing, applications and services exist in a single generic cloud platform.

To add new instances of a server, users simply select a running website, application or service and choose to create a new instance. Load balancing is automatically managed by the Azure platform.

This leads to a hugely simplified and more dynamic way of working since the whole notion of a server is removed leaving just services and applications within the Azure cloud.

Currently, the test version of Azure only supports Live, SQL and web services but application support is expected to follow during 2009.

We are able to provide support and development services to anyone wishing to migrate current or new services to the Azure cloud.

We are also currently looking at Googles cloud platform while researching other new cloud technologies.

These may be added at a later date depending on how much value we feel they offer clients of OPSC Limited.

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