On Ramps That Improve Cloud Performance

By: John Shepler

IT infrastructure is now key to your business. It’s a lot more than a few servers in a closet down the hall these days. Chances are that you are using Software as a Service (SaaS) running on popular public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure plus your own private data center. What once was an easy interconnect to everything on a company LAN is now a worrying mix of local and remote connections. Are you stuck with performance that varies constantly and nightmares of security breaches, or is there a much better solution?

Weak Links In The Chain
When equipment or services are remotely located, the first thing everybody thinks of is connecting through the Internet. Broadband is readily available nearly everywhere and very reasonably priced. This is especially true if you just connect through a Cable broadband service. Reliability of HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) networks has gotten very good and prices are as low as you’ll find.

The massive adoption of consumer broadband is what has kept prices low even for business broadband. The tradeoff is that you are sharing that connection with dozens or even hundreds of other users. You can’t see them, but you can feel the effect as the Internet speeds up and slows down.

Dedicated Access Improves Performance
The Internet is an amazing data superhighway, but the on and off ramps are where a lot of the congestion is. A good solution is get a private ramp, called Dedicated Internet Access or DIA, between you and your Internet service provider. This is most likely a fiber Ethernet connection but could be Fixed Wireless as long as the path you are using is dedicated for your use only.

Why Not All Private Access?
The next step up is a completely private line from your local network to your cloud service provider. Once again, this would be a fiber optic Ethernet running 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps with guaranteed performance. This is like having your own highway with no traffic other than your company data. It’s the closest thing to a LAN that stretches across the country to include your cloud services.

The drawback to dedicated private lines is the cost, as you might suspect. There is no one else sharing the pipe, so there is no one else helping to pay for it. You have all the bandwidth and the security of a walled-off connection, but you have all the costs too.

An intermediate solution that maintains connection performance and offers high security over long distances is the MPLS network with dedicated access lines. The MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network is a private Wide Area Network with costs that are shared among many subscribers, but with performance guarantees instead of the “best effort” you get on the Internet. Security is better than the Internet because the network uses a proprietary label switching protocol and not the easier to hack TCP/IP.

Move Next Door To Really Improve Performance
Remember how easily it was to get all the network performance you needed when everything was in the same building and all you needed was runs of Ethernet cabling? You can replicate that by choosing to move your equipment to a colocation center that also houses your software service providers or has dedicated cloud on-ramps.

This is an example of a hybrid cloud. Your servers and storage are in racks in the colo building that supplies power and cooling. It also has direct cable or fiber connections to service providers housed in the same building. Other direct connections go to points of presence for large public cloud services that are located in multiple data centers around the world. By accessing one of these cloud on-ramps you avoid the vagaries of the Internet and connect your private cloud to their public cloud to create the hybrid cloud arrangement.

Of course, this can be expanded to include multiple services providers as long as they have a physical presence or on-ramps available in the data center. Connect to as many as make sense to create a multi-cloud that give you all the services you need. The connection to your business is then through a dedicated private line or Dedicated Internet Access from your colocated equipment back to your offices. This is considerably more cost effective than having many dedicated private lines to widely scattered service providers.

Do you need higher performance than your current connections can provide or have a requirement to interconnect multiple service providers? If so, find out what mix of dedicated, dedicated access and cloud on-ramps would work best for your company.

Managed Cloud Solutions Are Your Business Edge

By: John Shepler

Computing is a two-edged sword. One edge is the business purpose why you invested in technology in the first place. It may be the only way that a business such as yours can even exist. The other edge is what that technology does to hold you back. It sucks up massive amounts of capital and expenses. It requires special teams of experts to keep it going, especially if you require an uninterrupted online presence 24/7. Then, to add insult to injury, everything goes obsolete and needs to be replaced. Is there a way to gain the benefits of computing technology without the equal and opposite liabilities?

Enter The Managed Cloud
Gone are the days when you had to do everything yourself. Companies that have evolved their computing resources over the decades became complacent with the incremental creep of adding more and more central resources to support an ever growing and more sophisticated suite of applications. You don’t have to have it all in-house any more. It’s a choice.

The alternative is the managed cloud. Think of your data center as being magically levitated and swept away to a distant location. You still have all the needed resources at your disposal. They are just located somewhere else.

Isn’t that a zero-sum game? It can be, but if you do it right, you gain something through expertise, efficiency and economy of scale.

Do You NEED Cloud?
Managed services run the gamut from simple dedicated servers collocated in a massive data center to public, private and hybrid cloud services. Cloud and colocation might sound the same, but colocation servers are a relative fixed structure that takes time to physically upscale and downscale. Cloud services are based around hypervisors, software that can quickly increase or decrease resources as needed.

If your needs are simple and relatively unvarying, a dedicated server might be all you need. You can rent space and install your own equipment, or rent what you need from the data center, along with the technical support to set everything up and perform maintenance and repair as needed.

Where the cloud shines is applications with requirements that vary wildly. For example, you may run an online store that has seasonal or infrequent peaks of activity that dwarf the usual traffic levels. If you depend on buying and setting up more hardware servers, the peak opportunity may have come and gone before you have the additional resources in place. Your site will stall or crash, frustrating customers who will take their business elsewhere.

Choose Your Cloud Carefully
Cloud services generally fall into one of three categories: private, public and hybrid. A private cloud is something like a private dedicated server or your in-house data center, except for the extra ability to scale up and down rapidly. Cloud systems are based on virtualization that takes a pool of hardware resources and allocates the elements efficiently, based on need.

Private means that even through you are contracting for services from a remote provider, the environment is single-tenant. You are using these particular resources and not sharing with anyone else. That’s peace of mind knowing that your network, compute and storage resources are dedicated to your applications only.

Public clouds are called multi-tenant. There is an enormous pool of hardware resources that are divided up among many simultaneous users. Public clouds are popular because they offer a nearly infinite pool of computing and storage resources for any one user. It’s a more efficient way to allocate resources and is reflected in a lower cost to each user.

Hybrid clouds are a combination of public and private clouds. You run your most sensitive applications on the private cloud and general applications, such as ecommerce, on the public cloud. By mixing and matching to the performance and security requirements of your applications, you get the best of both worlds, without having to pay up for resources you aren’t using.

It’s Time For Your Cloud
You’re aware of the industry buzz. Everyone company seems to be heading to the cloud, if they aren’t already there. It’s a major paradigm shift in how computers are used by business. You must be automated and connected to be competitive. But, you don’t have to be in the business of buying, running, maintaining and upgrading all of that equipment and software.

The efficiency of cloud solutions can’t be underestimated. By paying only for what you use at the moment, you get out of the business of having to anticipate your future needs and taking the calculated risk of buying too much too soon or losing business because you underestimated. The cloud will let you react to business surges, steady growth, or the unfortunate need for downsizing, should the market conditions dictate.

Time to upgrade, find a more cost effective solution or dip your toe in the world of cloud hosted services. Many solutions and expert consultation are available right now.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.