What is Cloud Computing?
Is best described as Spreading your infrastructure needs and requirements across traditional technologies and hardware using virtualisation technologies to provide a higher level of redundancy and availability than was previously achievable at a vastly reduced price.

What is Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)?
Companies no longer rely on hardware vendors for their hardware needs. By outsourcing to a IaaS provider they can easily scale up and down their hardware requirements, without incurring the expense of buying or managing their own hardware.

What is Cloud Storage?
Is the term used when you store your companies data or personal data across the internet onto a cloud infrastructure. As your data is stored across multiple SAN storage devices and not in a single physical location this is referred to as cloud storage.

What are Application Stacks?
Application stacks are a pre-bundled selection of software which allow users to quickly deploy or configure a server by installing all the necessary software or operating system via a one-click install.

What is SAN Storage?
Storage Area Network devices are the large highly redundant and highly reliable servers that sit at the back end of all cloud computing infrastructures and provide the large amount of storage space needed in a typical cloud computing set up

What is a Node?
Used when referring to a physical server within a cloud infrastructure. A node does not contain any customer data and is only utilised for its CPU and RAM

What is Self healing architecture ?
When a node or SAN storage array fails there are additional nodes and SANs which quickly and automatically take the load ensuring continued, uninterrupted service.

What is Failover?
It means that when a node or server fails there is another one in place to immediately take the load and continue serving your webpages or application without interruption.

What is Multi-homed?
Is a process used to increase the reliability and redundancy of the network connection to the hardware, as it removes any single point of failure by bringing multiple internet connections into the platform.

What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?
This is where companies are using software that is not installed on their actual PC , but rather connecting over the internet to access the likes of google docs, email, company intranets and communication tools such as VOIP and messenger services, these are hosted by third partner providers and companies pay for access to the online tools as they need them.

What is Virtualization?
Is taken traditional hardware technology and better utilizing it to get maximum use of it and reduce the costs of deploying additional servers/ this is done by software providing a complete simulation of the underlying hardware, and allowing you to deploy multiple virtual server on a single physical hardware server

What is Os Virtualization?
Is where the virtualization technology sits on the operating system level of the server and allows for multiple isolated user-space instances.The restriction on this type of virtualization is that the multiple virtual machines all have to run on the same operating machine as the overall physical machine.

What is Para-Virtualization?
Allows the virtualization software to sit on the actual hardware level of the server , giving a far greater level of control to each of the virtual machine , users can modify their virtual servers down to a kernel level and install whatever operating system they like, this is what dediserve uses.

What is Virtual KVM Acces?
Is the level of access you receive to your para virtualized virtual server, allowing for you to perform functions such as hard reboots as well as complete power downs

Are we missing anything? Anything you would like to know, feel free to ask and we will add it to the list.

I suppose the first thing to clear up,the technologies and techniques currently being used in cloud computing are not new.Virtualization has been around for some years and is an integral part of all cloud based solutions. Most people would agree that there is nothing more to cloud computing than a simple re-packaging of existing technologies.

However if we ignore the current hype surrounding the term it’s become clear that cloud computing represents a complete shift in how computational resources are used and will be used going forward.One of the biggest benefits from this shift is “scalability”, In particular the ‘elastic’ nature of cloud scalability – the ability to effectively scale up infinitely but also to scale down as demand decreases.

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Below is a recent interview given to Adrian Weckler From the Sunday Business Post entitled  – Dummies Guide To Virtualisation.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4izU5LQQMw

For anyone who runs a website or is looking a running one, there comes a time when you need to decide what hosting package you are going to need.
Getting the hosting set-up wrong at the start can lead to a whole host of issues and problems as your site grows.Whilst shared hosting is fine for most early stage websites , what works for most users in the long-term is virtual private servers.

Basically what a Virtual private server allows, is instead of having to share your hosting space with other users , you can get root access to your own server which allows it to be more customizable for your needs, allowing you to make whatever changes needed to improve your website without affecting anyone else or having to verify it with your shared hosting provider before you install any software you might need. (more…)

Over the last two years or so, the use of the word “cloud” has been associated with just about every hosting product coming onto the market.This has lead to some real confusion to just what is “the cloud”.

Here at dediserve we define the cloud as simply:

“Spreading your infrastructure needs and requirements across traditional technologies and hardware using virtualisation technologies to provide a higher level of redundancy and availability than was previously achievable”

What that means is “the cloud” is not a re-invention of the wheel, it’s simply a better way ultizing existing technologies in a new way to better suit the modern day needs of businesses and individuals in the internet sphere.It removes the need for your virtual server to be down at any one time, whether that be through malicious users or hardware failure, as your actual server information is not stored in a single physical location.

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We here at dediserve have stressed before the vital importance that back-ups play with your data, at dediserve we provide you with the ability to switch on automatic daily/weekly and monthly back-ups as well as two manual back-ups. Or you can simply take up to five manual back-ups as well.However not everyone is lucky enough to have their back-ups looked after by dediserve .

So i have put together a list of free opensource back-ups tool which can be easily installed and set-up on any linux based server.

CloneZilla

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

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One thing that we really concentrated on when putting together our plans was providing the best amount of resources on the best possible platform at the best possible price. We believed we achieved that by building out our own custom cloud platform and virtualizing the whole infrastruture,which in turn is then managed by our custom built control panel software.

And im glad to say after doing a comparions chart (below) it shows that Dediserve easily ranks right up there in terms of pricing and specs with some of the biggest VPS providers in the world, as well as easily providing the best spec in Ireland. I was limited in terms of space of what i could include such as additonal things like amount of Ip’s included as well as free back-ups and control panel software.

Also to Make the comparsion chart easier to use depending on what resource is most important to you , simply click on the header of each section to display ( cheapest to dearest) etc.

Let me know if you wish to see other companies added to the list.

VPS Comparsion Chart

With the ever increasing demand of more and more internet traffic , one of the most important facets of any popular website is being able to handle that traffic and remain stable and fast. Downtime can be disastrous forcing customers and also revenue to look elsewhere.

What can be done? The solution is simple, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. This can be achieved by using hardware and software to build out highly redundant and highly scalable network services. One of the most popular methods is currently load balancing your site across multiple machines.

Load balancing as defined in wikipedia is the following:

a technique to distribute workload evenly across two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancing service is usually provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a multilayer switch or a DNS server).

Now thanks to the Linux Virtual Server Project and the growth of Xen powered Virtual Servers provided by that great company dediserve.com , you can now very simply and very cheaply build out your own load balanced cluster for as little as €80 per month.

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As a follow on from the django framework post i wrote about previously , i will now talk about a second framework that we also offer pre-installed on our virtual servers, which is probably the fastest growing framework out there today and thats Ruby on rails , RoR is also an opensource web application framework for the ruby programming language and is used for rapid development.

As your VPS comes already pre-installed and pre-configured with the RoR saving you time and hassle, you can login straight away and start configuring your app/site.

If your New to RoR, you can, via the RoR website  follow the step by step screencast to building your own blog engine. Which will give you a good overview of the power and flexibility of this framework.

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As a server provider we constantly speak with customers about the best architecture for their server set-up. Ideally you are looking to provide a redundant, scalable server cluster with a good spec on a redundant platform at a good price.

This is something Dediserve can now provide at exceptional value , via a single user interface you can easily manage multiple virtual machines all running different technologies , you can have a dedicated mail server , database server and web server in your own virtualized cluster for as little as  €60 per month, and easily upgrade each individual server as the requirement of that server grows, meaning if you have a large database but small website , easily upgrade the database server to handle the added load whilst leaving the web server as is.

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