The first time I heard about Grid Computing I was still up at school in the late 90s which, not surprisingly, was around the same time I was engrossed in my parallel computing course. All the talk of IPC and modulo arithmetic joined in an unholy matrimony with massive amounts of Mountain Dew and 3am whiteboarding in the labs, the offspring of which was a simple understanding of why and when to use parallel computing.

Fast forward to today and Silicon Valley’s VCs have eliminated all but the most trendy of ideas to back, the recent darlings being so-called Cloud computing. So what is Cloud Computing? Supposedly The Cloud is an ultra-scalable architecture that has implicit redundancy so no one ever has to go through the painful process of upgrading hardware; is this not the panacea of Datacenter logistics – completely automated vertical scalability?

The Promise
Current providers of Cloud provisioning software, such as 3Tera, promise less cost, ease of maintenance, and simple scalability. Need a new server? Just click a few buttons and you have a new virtual server, possibly pre-configured with software and even your specific settings.

The Failure
While having a large and dynamic infrastructure is appealing, there are inherent problems with the current approaches, the most obvious of which is the lack of failure abstraction. While products like VMWare have the ability to provide fail-over automatically, the fact that offerings like Applogic and EC2 do not provide such capabilities out-of-the-box is very telling about the underlying architecture. While many can argue that Xen-based hypervisors can be instrumented to failover, the fact that the technology does not, as a matter of its DNA, provide failover is The Failure. In order to provide the promises marketing for the various grid services has suggested, not only do we need to scale easily, but we need reliability; you cannot provide one and not the other.

Commentary
We all know that technology changes rapidly, but vendors and pundits fail when they speak as if change is good just for the sake of itself. Recently we’ve seen many old architectures rehashed: mainframe dumb-terminals have become remote desktops and terminal services, talk of Ethernet’s limitations being replaced with a protocol that involves a “Token” and the new SMP craze disguised as multi-core processing. It’s time for some real progress. It may be in the same way virtualization has brought us the Cloud that the Cloud itself may be an intermediate step to something better. At the very least let’s hope that the next step on the ladder is up, not down.

If you are looking for a small business hosting service, you have several options to choose from. You really don’t have to worry about the cost because there are many affordable webhosting providers offering their service.

Different Categories of Small Business Webhosting Services

Hosting website services for small businesses can be divided into four categories — corporate co-location, managed web hosting, shared and in-house. Among these four, it is advisable for you to start with managed dedicated hosting. What does this mean? Basically, when you use a dedicated hosting website service, it means that you would rent your dedicated server from a service provider. Of course, you may customize your server and place remote server access. However, the service provider would be responsible for providing the hardware and software needed to operate the server. They would also be responsible for installing and maintaining the same. What does this mean to you then? This translates into cost savings for you and your business.

When you opt for managed dedicated hosting, you will be able to avoid the expense associated with setting up and maintaining a website. The cost of the bandwidth is oftentimes distributed to all the provider’s clients, so all of these clients save a lot of money. You would also be able to enjoy the quirks offered by the managed dedicated hosting providers. You could take advantage of the service packages as well.

A corporate co-located webhosting, on the other hand, allows you to store your own hardware and Internet connection into a particular server space that your provider will allocated for you. This allows you to save a few dollars here and there, but this does not offer the same savings that managed dedicated hosting service does.

Choosing Your Managed Dedicated Hosting Server

Generally if you want a secure, reliable but completely affordable way of putting up your website, website hosting is the perfect choice. However, you should make sure that you have a reliable webhosting provider. They should be able to ensure that they can provide search engine visibility for your website, so check for a dedicated webhosting server that is continuously up and running. This will guarantee that your website will be up all the time and people will be able to have access to you and your service at all times.

These days, business owners need to have their own website if they want to stay ahead of their competitors. However, you need to make sure that would still be able to save money from setting up and maintaining a website and you can only do this if you use a managed dedicated hosting service.

When you are running a business you know there is a need to store data, be it data that your clients have access to or data that you access to service your clients.  For any business data loss will lead to a serious disaster. It is obvious that you will be storing all your data in the server at your office. Now consider a situation where your office infrastructure will not allow the server placement. In such conditions, you will be looking for a server hosting services that host your data in their servers. You will not be able to maintain the actual hardware and you have to share the critical data with other companies. These are all avoided with server co-location.

The changing business trend

Today any business needs to store information and there is a great importance on the reliability of that data.  For anything ranging from the company’s progress to future research to project-related information, data is very essential. Without appropriate data, the business cannot continue. Network redundancy is becoming more and more important. The IT infrastructure is gaining value and these days, every business is having its own servers. The cost of server systems is also reducing and you can easily get a server for your business. Catastrophes can occur at any time and if you have a single server at your office and some serious disaster happens at your office, you may not be able to recover the lost data. This will create serious damages to your company and data redundancy is commonly demanded by modern day businesses.

What is server co-location?

You may have an office with excellently built IT infrastructure but you are not able to manage your own server. Server management includes 24/7 monitoring and you have to also concentrate on the temperature and environmental conditions. The servers should be placed in an air conditioned room all the time and the changes in temperature like heat and humidity affect the data in the server. If you install the server in your own office itself, you will have to spend a lot of manpower in taking care of the server. With server co-location, you can have your server at the company offering server co-location service and remotely access the server using high speed high bandwidth connections. Your day to day activities will not be affected by the server co-location. You can the access data in the server just as if you are operating the server located in a different room within the same building.

Server co-location services

With the increasing demand of the businesses, many companies are now offering server co-location services. These companies will give you the shelf space and the man power for server management. A reliable team of engineers will be available with the server co-location company who will offer 24/7 support for your server. A dedicated premium network that has several Tier-1 carriers will be made available to you for enabling the network redundancy and for minimizing the latency. This is critical because you have to access the server from your office and latency is undesirable. The network that is provided will be highly secure with all the necessary firewall protection. You can visit the server co-location company and physically access your server and upgrade the hardware if you wish.  For more information on server colocation visit http://utropicmedia.net/colocation.php.

Deployment Footprint
Create a UML Deployment diagram early. A Deployment Diagram helps everyone quickly identify what systems and users will be impacted by the change in technology and process. Having the Deployment Diagram exist as a living artifact throughout the lifetime of your project also helps other teams easily asses impact to any new or existing projects.

Project Timeline
Leverage your SaaS provider’s experience. Often service providers for SaaS projects will have a library of best-practices that can aid your project management team. Focus on how the SaaS company defines milestones and understand how they project the duration from one milestone to the next. The information the SaaS company provides can be used to build dependencies in your project plan.

Process Integration
One of the major benefits to using SaaS is that packaged services are designed to easily integrate with existing technologies and infrastructures. When looking at SaaS applications, make sure there are XML or RMI interfaces. Also, well-documented database schemas great for running ad-hoc queries. Most SaaS vendors provide robust reporting capabilities – just make sure they provide you the documentation to interface with the system.

ROI Milestone
Define your ROI milestones early. It’s ok if your expectations for cost-savings are all over the place. Your SaaS provider will have financial models that will help your organization forecast cost-savings by using their implementation over using a standard model.

Summary
SaaS models can easily reduce your projects costs by double-digit percentages. The key as you gain experience with SaaS is to refine your process in the same way a software development life-cycle will evolve. Additionally, leverage your SaaS provider’s experience and become partners in completing a successful project.