For all the hype, over the last few years an
increasing number of businesses have started moving not just distribution
but more important business processes online in earnest. The main reason
this much anticipated migration has dragged its heels is that change takes
time, and businesses going online are faced with hurdles of cost,
complexity, resourcing, and marketing at every step of the process.
The
workhorse in terms of infrastructure of this fundamental change is
hosting.
As
many businesses now know, hosting has a wide range of options in terms of
cost and function, but it's the growth of Dedicated Hosting that has
continued to gather momentum over recent years. The most interesting
aspect of this growth is that indicators show that most businesses are at
the bottom of the adoption curve and that the most aggressive growth is
yet to come.
What customers want
What
customers have wanted, but more importantly needed, over the past years
has changed considerably. As businesses become leaner and headcounts
shrink, so priorities and their drivers have changed. So-called
"Have-to-haves" or essential requirements are the issues ones getting any
traction, relegating "Nice-to-haves" to the back-burner until they either
become irrelevant or are escalated for other reasons.
This
phenomenon has seen companies spend less time, resources and money on
their online presence than they might have.
Priorities
have changed.
Issues
that have re-prioritised the importance and investment in online presence
and tools now include better brand awareness through greater exposure,
increased distribution driving higher sales and new markets, and better
processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
As
customers realise that their commitment to their online tools needs to
increase, so too does their requirement for effective development.
Once
the development has been defined and is nearing completion, the tool
requires a means of delivery, being effective hosting.
Hosting
is then divided into two categories: Shared hosting (otherwise known as
virtual hosting, as opposed to virtualised hosting) and dedicated hosting.
Dedicated
hosting is a requirement once the environment that the developer requires
becomes either more complex. or more customised than a vanilla shared
hosting environment.
In
short, custom development requires the freedom that only a dedicated
hosting environment can deliver.
How service providers are meeting customers’
needs
Dedicated
hosting has traditionally been delivered by Carriers, Internet Service
Providers or Hosting Providers. Of these, it has quickly become apparent
that hosting, particularly dedicated hosting, is a specialisation
requiring specific skills to deliver the required product offerings.
As
dedicated hosting growth gathers momentum, so too does the need for fast,
cost effective delivery. Until recently, delivering dedicated hosting has
meant a long-winded and complex process for both service provider and
customer alike, involving specifying and sourcing the right hardware, burn
testing, server OS configuration, application configuration, IDC
installation and connectivity configuration and finally a handover to the
customer to, only then, start the process of final configuration for
production rollout.
The
process is long-winded, expensive and complex for all parties concerned.
Issues
continue for dedicated hosting servers set up this way as, when the times
to upgrade disk, RAM or even the whole server, the process begins again
from the start.
Virtualisation: Not as good as, better.
New
virtualization technology is now set to deliver dedicated hosting in a way
that not only eliminates most of the complexity for both service provider
and customer alike, but introduces many additional virtualised hosting
benefits that have not previously existed.
For
service providers, it allows scalable, profitable and fast delivery of
premium dedicated hosting.
For
customers, it eliminates hardware, hardware drivers and hardware upgrades.
In addition, due to the features included in some server virtualisation
technology, it delivers far higher levels of availability and allows
clones of production environments to be created for seamless development
and rollout.
Virtualisation and virtualisation
As
either a service provider or a customer, it’s important to understand that
many different flavours of server virtualisation exist, bringing different
price points, levels of resource control and base-OS independence.
Apart
from resource control and allocation, stability of, and independence from,
the underlying OS is essential to realising all the available benefits of
server virtualisation technology and quality virtualised hosting.
Of
all the current crop of server virtualisation technology, VMware Virtual
Infrastructure 3 seems to lead the market against all of the above
criteria, combining the highest available resource control with
elimination of hardware drivers. Infrastructure 3 also allows intelligent
high-availability redistribution of VMs from failed physical servers to
the remaining healthy servers in the farm.
Server
virtualisation technology is set to expand its market share as it has in
the wider server market – it just depends on whether virtualised hosting
service providers and customers alike realise the possibilities available
for premium virtualised hosting.
