Private servers offer range of technical tasks
By Leslie Faughnan
The pace of development in ICT virtualisation in recent years has driven general business acceptance of the concept. It has also driven the rise of a new breed of business and consumer service delivered over the web.
The hosting of websites and services such as customer orders have been around for more than a decade. Most business people are well aware of online back-up services, for example.
The natural extension of these concepts is the virtual private server (VPS). The customer has the use of a virtual server online, for web services, data or applications. Virtual desktop technologies, such as Windows terminal services or Citrix, enable a user to work with applications in exactly the same way as if the server were a physical box on the other side of the Lan.
From the service providers’ point of view, the portfolio of virtual servers can be readily managed with all of today’s sophisticated virtualisation tools.
In almost all cases, the actual physical host for the virtual entities is a large commercial data centre.
The variant is cloud hosting, where the virtual resources might be supplied from multiple possible data centres. But there will always be a prime data centre with first-line responsibility.
The specialist service provider takes advantage of the data centre benefits in security and connectivity, either setting up its own server hardware or renting space. It adds value by the expert management of the virtual resources. It also delivers value, because virtualisation enables the server and data storage needs of its clients to be safely and securely pooled.
Lifescience.ie, the specialist recruitment agency, uses Dediserve to host and run eight linked websites (see panel above).
“We operate in sectors like medical devices and pharmaceuticals that are still recruiting,” said Eamon O Raghallaigh, managing director of Lifescience.” Our clients and candidates are all ICT literate and international, so we depend completely on smart online systems.”
Lifescience is one of the higher-level users of the Dediserve service, because it has been focused for several years on integrating web technology into mainstream recruitment.
“We have pioneered the use of social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogs for the dissemination of information to jobseekers,” O Raghallaigh said.
“Combining our experience and indeed expertise with Dediserve is working extremely well in what we are convinced is the correct business model for us. Scalability could be very important and it would be nice to have the market upturn to test it.”
C Infinity is a slightly older business, an online server hosting and back-up company set up in 2007 that is totally based on a virtualised environment.
“Using virtualisation as an enabler, we can design and manage secure, high performing and dedicated private servers or even private clouds for our customers,” said Aidan Finn, chief technology officer of C Infinity.
“We now provide high performance servers at a reasonable cost level for more than 1,000 clients, with back-up and business continuity solutions that will scale and respond quickly to their business needs.”
This is what is beginning to be called infrastructure on demand, which is entirely based on virtualisation.
One satisfied C Infinity client is Zignals.com, an Irish company that has produced a sort of eBay for investors. Members can build and share trading strategies to improve performance and share in revenues. Zignals members get real-time data and the advanced analysis tools which, in the past, were limited to brokers and dealing rooms.
“With members from the US to India, power, scalability, expansion and flexibility are al l critical to our time-sensitive application,” said Scott Tattersall, chief technology officer of Zignals.” Fault tolerance is obviously critical to us also.
Load-balanced web servers and clustered database servers ensure that everything stays up and online.”
