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March 24, 2008
The Virtual Evolution of Managed Services
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There is no doubt that managed hosting has been undergoing an on-demand transformation thanks to advances in virtualization and grid technologies, but although the underlying technologies might be similar, the available services are increasingly unique -- targeted at doing a few things and doing them well. This is especially true for two relatively recent entrants into the virtualized hosting fray.
Bringing Virtualization to Canada's SMBs
Radiant Communications, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based provider of commercial broadband solutions, publicly entered the virtual space in October 2007 with its AlwaysThere hosted Exchange offering. Leveraging Radiant's Grid Computing Utility (GCU), a collection of virtual machines combined with a flexible storage area network (SAN), the hosted Exchange offering gives users a dedicated instance of Microsoft Exchange with, according to Radiant's director of advanced hosting, Jason Leeson, all the security and flexibility of an on-premise offering, as well as the economies of scale that come along with a shared environment. Thus far, the company has been focusing its marketing efforts around the Exchange service (specifically within the Canadian SMB market), and has been gaining a lot of traction as a result, but Leeson says that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Radiant also is offering virtual servers (running Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux or any VMware-compatible OS) to customers who want the ability to scale their resources as needed, on demand, without having to invest in purchasing and managing physical machines. Leeson said the concept of renting virtual servers on a pay-per-use basis is currently showing the most opportunity for uses such as disaster recovery (i.e., backup) and business continuity (i.e., automatic failover), but some customers are actually hosting their own applications on the grid. Radiant's grid computing environment is connected directly to its existing MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) core network, which Leeson says allows Radiant to host and deliver grid-based virtual servers and applications for each customer in a completely secure and private manner.
Concerning the latter, Leeson acknowledges that Radiant's virtual server model is still in its infancy, but points to significant advancements on the horizon. Currently, users wishing to cluster several VMs must wire the servers together themselves, as Radiant has not yet incorporated that level of automation. Additionally, customers must add servers directly through Radiant, with servers usually provisioned and ready to go in a few hours. However, Leeson explained, Radiant is only in the first stage of a three-phase rollout: (1) standardize the grid infrastructure; (2) build the internal management tools for automation and provisioning; and (3) delegate administration, control and management to users. Once the final phase is complete -- or at least underway -- Leeson says customers will have the full virtual private datacenter (VPDC) experience of being able to turn up or turn down servers on demand, track server utilization, etc. He thinks these customer-side management tools and consoles will be big differentiators as Radiant continues to grow its service.
Right now, the main target for virtual servers and VPDCs is the independent IT consultant market. “We talk to a lot of IT consultants, for example, who don't have their own datacenters [but] have niche vertical apps that they offer to their customer base,” said Leeson. “This is an opportunity for them to tap into the Radiant datacenter, and we set them up with the virtual servers and they can run what they want.” Professional service organizations, such as law firms, have been the main customers for the AlwaysThere hosted Exchange offering, added Leeson.
Hosting in the Cloud
Attacking the management problem from a different angle is Mosso, a Rackspace company that started in 2006 when co-founders Jonathan Bryce and Todd Morey had the idea to offer Rackspace's enterprise-level technology to smaller users in a multi-tenant environment. In February of this year, Mosso introduced a revamped service -- the Hosting Cloud -- in an attempt to make the Web hosting experience as simple as possible without sacrificing reliability.
Leveraging a cloud of computers and VMs to offer customers as-needed scalability, Bryce describes the Hosting Cloud as “a place where developers can basically upload their code and we take care of the rest.” With this in mind, the infrastructure uses standard Web technologies like PHP, Ruby, Perl, .NET, and ASP, and users don't do any server provisioning, as Mosso's internally developed software manages provisioning, scaling and other aspects of the environment automatically. Once the application has been uploaded via the Web interface, $100 per month gives customers access to 500GB of bandwidth, 50GB of high-performance storage and 3 million Web requests. Scaling is done automatically as applications experience greater traffic or require more resources, and the extra resources and/or Web requests cost only “pennies”: $.50 per gigabyte of disk space; $.25 per gigabyte of bandwidth; and $.03 per 1,000 Web requests. “A lot of those other systems,” said Bryce “... make it easy to provision additional resources quickly, but they don't necessarily do it automatically.”
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