Organisations today have more choice than ever when it comes to deploying applications and services.
In-house deployment, managed hosting, cloud services, private cloud, colocation, shared hosting, virtualised hosting, Software as a Service, or Application Service Providers. These are all buzzwords you most likely will have heard doing the rounds, but what do they all mean and how do they help your organisation to maximise the efficiency with which it deploys applications in the most cost effective manner.
Over the last 5 years the use of virtualisation technologies has become the norm amongst large corporations and now also heavily used in the SME space. With the benefits of better capacity utilisation, centralised management, improved resilience and reliability and performance increases, the hosting industry has snapped up this technology in what is now becoming a common offering, “Virtualised Hosting”.
What is Virtualised Hosting???
Virtualised Hosting is an offering from many of traditional hosting providers whereby they build an enterprise class server, storage and network resource pool which can be divided up and rented out to customers. The underlying technology for this offering is Virtualisation (VMware, Citrix or Microsoft). Customers can rent an amount of CPU resource, memory, storage and networking from which to run their given application.
Think of it like this: when you go away on holiday, you first decide where you would like to go, how you will get there and where you want to stay. In most cases this will be somewhere hot and sunny, usually requiring a flight and you will look to stay in a hotel of some kind. Apart from the very rich and famous, this will all usually be done on a shared basis. The flight is shared with other holiday makers, the resort is usually a holiday makers resort filled with other likeminded people looking for that sunny getaway and the hotel is purpose built for holiday makers. This can be seen as the “Virtualised Hosting” way of holiday making.
The “Traditional Hosting/On-premise deployment” Holiday might go something like this: The holiday maker could hire a private jet to take them personally to their chosen destination, which co-incidently is a private resort, exclusive from other holiday makers, staying in a private villa or hotel with no other holiday makers. Lets not forget this whole process has been organised, planned and managed by the holiday maker, whilst the “virtualised hosting” holiday maker can rest assured the entire experience has been planned by the travel agent and they are always on hand to help out if anything were to go wrong.
So my imagination might be getting the better of me a little, however the principle is exactly the same as that of “Cloud” or “Virtualised” hosting.
For many this is a massive shift in paradigm, as the traditional thinking holds the hardware as fundimental in the provision and ownership of the application. Many IT Managers like to have the ability to see and touch the servers and applications they deploy.
This shift in thinking has massive benefits, and once that association between the hardware and the application is broken down, the business can begin to benefit from agility, flexibility and cost savings.
Imagine being able to deploy applications in minutes, hours or days rather than weeks, months or even years in some extreme cases. Imagine having the flexibility to scale an application up of down without thaving to buy additional hardware resources.
But this Cloud offering doesn’t have to stop at the Server/Application. Many organisations have now looked to expand this methodology to the desktop. Would it be possible to centrally deploy desktops from the data centre where they can all be managed and maintained. No longer does my support arm have to reach the desk, when we can now bring the desktop to support.
With the likelyhood of a Windows7 upgrade due for most organisations over the next year or two, perhaps now is the time to look at alternative ways to deploy these desktops.
In short, the outlook is cloudy, but this doesn’t necessarily mean we need to stay indoors, as the future is bright.
For more info on Virtualised Hosting or Desktop Virtualisation, please do not hesitate to contact me on david.garfit@servo.co.uk
