Utility

Hosting / IT / Utility — 2 Comments
23
Nov 09

Backups in the Hosting World

Something we’ve been finding pretty frustrating lately is the whole issue of backups. On my desktop I run Dropbox, but there still isn’t a Dropbox quality (or ease of use) service for hosting companies. If you run a website / service / business you need at the very least, a disaster recovery plan, and that plan involves backups. There are several ways hosting companies deal with this.

1) They dont do them

Yeah you read that right. You don’t actually get backups. These policies are buried deep in their terms of service or usage policies. It’s totally up to you to backup your server content. If you don’t and your server crashes its the end-users problem. High profile data losses can destroy any business, especially startups.

2) Highly Available Storage

This strategy is usually combined with #1 above. Instead of backing up your data they just replicate your data across multiple drives. This means that the chances of you losing your data go down, and depending on the technology used to safeguard against drive failure, you can get really high availability. (iSCSI and ZFS come to mind). Its important to remember that RAID is NOT a backup solution, only a way to mitigate potential failures.

3) OS Level Backups

In this strategy end users are still required to worry about their own data, and choose which sets of data they backup. A hosting company will provide an end-point for you to send your backups to. If you’ve ever done managed or dedicated hosting, this is often the product that is sold. Tivoli or some other backup client is provided, but still relies on either a consultant, sysadmin or service provider to configure correctly.

4) VM Level Backups

There’s another solution that works, and it gets around a lot of the issues with OS level backups, like running a database while doing a backup, etc. Snapshot the entire virtual machine and replicate the VM to an off-site storage system. For better performance, use data de-duplication technology to reduce the amount of time to perform your backup. This system seems to work well, however few providers are offering it.

What do you think? What’s your favourite backup strategy as a hosting company?

Amazon / Hosting / Oppportunity / Standards / Utility — No Comments
27
Oct 09

Competing in a Commodity Hosting Market

We knew it was going to happen but perhaps not so soon. Today Amazon announced that it would be reducing it’s pricing on EC2 linux instances by 15%. That’s a pretty significant cost reduction but we also have to factor in a whole bunch of other costs to figure out what their strategy seems to be.

Unlike with most bundled VPS services where you get a certain amount of disk space, bandwidth, memory and CPU resources, the Amazon model breaks things down into separate categories. You pay per use on everything. Instances per hour, Bandwidth and Storage per Gig, etc. Under this model it makes sense to shift your revenue to things that are higher margin. What that means is that with enough scale, you could almost afford to break even on the server instance and make money on other things – like bandwidth.

This is similar to the concept of “Freemium” in the Web Apps world. You get to use the basic version at a heavy heavy discount (in some cases free), but the add-ons, extra functionality, etc results in having to pay. The difference is that in the harsh reality of hosting, it costs real money to run a server.

Cloud Computing / Green / Hosting / IT / Oppportunity / Strategy / Utility — No Comments
9
Oct 09

Government Brief on Canadian Cloud Computing

Today the Canadian Government released a brief on the opportunities for Canada in Cloud Computing. It’s a great paper that highlights some of the benefits and strategic advantages of building large cloud computing centers in Canada. I’ll jump straight to the conclusion in the article: Canada is one of the BEST places to build out data centers and cloud computing infrastructure. The article mentions a bunch of reasons – I’ll expand on a few.

Geography & Climate

Most of the costs associated with running the 1,000′s of servers is directly associated with the price of electricity and the cost of cooling. Canada has cheap, renewable electricity & it’s colder. That means you can offer competitive services at better margins than someone running a cloud in the hot Nevada Desert. Michael Geist wrote more about it at Clean Cloud Computing.

Legal Reasons

Not only are many Canadian companies required to keep their data on native soil, the privacy and electronic documentations act means keeping information here is a really good idea.

Reliable, low cost, renewable energy

The BC, PEI, and Quebec governments actually have the cleanest and lowest cost per KWh electricity prices in all of North America. That’s possible through the use of hydro-electric dams, which also have an extremely low carbon footprint. As stated previously, the cost of running your servers is mostly the cost of electricity.
Cheaper electricty = Competitive Cloud

We’re right next to the American market

One of the fastest computer networks in the world, funded in part by the Canadian government, already runs through most of Canada. We’re also right next to the American market. That means North Americans can’t really tell if their servers are in Nevada or Nunavut. From a consumers perspective, there would be no reason not to use a Canadian Cloud that’s cheap, secure, and efficient, and we would be able to export a utility that is higher margin than say, electricity.

All in all I’m really excited by this report, and I’m sure that more people will be thinking about the potential Canada has to become the world leader in cloud computing services. You can get a little more background information, and learn more about the suggested ways forward by reading the brief here “Cloud Computing and the Canadian Government“

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