Virtual Data Center

Herakles Data, in partnership with AccessFlow www.accessflow.com has developed a Virtual Data Center within our Data Center. Recognizing the extensive advantages Virtualization offers, Herakles and AccessFlow, have developed two new service offerings designed and engineered to provide our clients with cost-effective, high availability and rapid recovery solutions. With the 99.999% infrastructure of the data center and AccessFlow’s knowledge and expertise in the design and development of virtual systems, clients are assured of the best advantages of Virtualization.

Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service (VHS) provides a complete system for development, test, and production environments. Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service (VRS) offers a whole new way to provide for Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity requirements that will actually be there when needed.

Both VHS and VRS were designed and built with clients in mind. No longer do clients have to pay for space, power and bandwidth. No need for large capital expenditures for IT equipment, software, and maintenance that constantly need to be upgraded or replaced. Instead they can pay for the processing power, storage and bandwidth that they actually need. The servers, VMWare, storage, bandwidth, networking and firewalls are all provided and managed with these two services. If you need more to add a virtual server, increase storage or bandwidth, you can do so in a matter of minutes.

What are the Benefits of Virtualization

Virtualization lets clients to minimize capital costs while establishing an extremely stable and secure environment that also rapidly scales. Most systems projects look at procuring hardware by the server with, and not by, the specific computing requirements to accomplish the unit of work. This process tends to buy computing power too early in the project and dollars are wasted and under utilized during the development cycle. Additionally, the hardware selected frequently will not meet the needs of the application as demand for access increases. Another problem with traditional computing has been the need to isolate server functions from each other. The accepted methodology for achieving this goal has been to purchase a physical server for each function in the application suite (i.e. Database, Web Server, and Application Servers).

Server Virtualization and an Asset Protection Strategies are instrumental to breaking the high entry cost of infrastructure hardware. We accomplish this by investing in at enterprise virtualization strategy that meets the developer’s needs and keeps the number of servers needed to a minimum. We expand the concept to save more hardware dollars by leveraging storage virtualization with SAN technology.

Storage virtualization creates an abstraction layer between physical and logical storage. The easiest way to accomplish this is with implementation of a Storage Area Network (SAN) in which an array of many different drives is seen as one homogeneous area. A SAN enables scaling up to potentially terabytes of data simply by adding drives. There is no requirement for downtime or for rebuilding servers.

What is Virtual Data Center?

The Virtual Data Center is comprised of the following:

• Dual core server farms with failover
• Enterprise EMC Storage Area Networks (SAN)
• Fiber Channel Switches
• Network Switches
• Firewall Service
• VMWare

What are the Advantages of Virtual Data Center?

The key advantages of the Virtual Data Center are:

• All hardware is provided
• All the physical infrastructure is fully managed to 99.999% availability
• SAN provides higher performance, higher reliability, upgrades on the fly
• True high availability for all Wintel and Lintel serversClient can provision new servers in minutes
• Development, test and production servers in an integrated environment
• Minimization or elimination of maintenance windows
• Major reduction in time to test new applications and roll out server patches and upgrades
• Licensing benefits from virtualizing MS SQL Server and other products
• Significant Cost Savings!

How does VDC work?

For Customers with Existing IT Systems

We deploy the agent-less VMware CapacityPlanner™ tool in order to gather server metrics regarding CPU utilization, memory and I/O over a period of 30 days. From this data, we are able to accurately catalog the performance of the servers and thereby develop a strategic plan to virtualize your production data center.

Production Systems
Once we have the strategic plan completed, we set up your development, test, and production systems on our Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service (VHS). Utilizing VMWare, we build out a configuration (i.e., processor capacity, memory, I/O, storage, networking gear and bandwidth) that meets all of your requirements. You provide and manage the operating system and the applications which run on our VHS. We manage all of the hardware, freeing you to work with your data and applications.

Disaster Recovery System
If you do not already utilize a SAN, we will suggest an appropriate solution that will house all of your data and virtual machines. The money saved from consolidating servers typically easily covers the cost of the SAN. We then continuously replicate your data and virtual machines to our SANs at Herakles Data in Sacramento.

In the event of loss of access to your data center servers or SAN for any reason, you can failover to our Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service™ at Herakles Data. Your users will then be able to securely access their applications and data through the Internet using a standard browser at home, another office, or other authorized locations. When your data center is available again, the updated data is replicated back and the access restored.

For Customers with the Need for a New Configuration

We simply configure the system to provide all of the necessary virtual servers, memory, I/O, storage and bandwidth that you require. Since the VCD is already built out and ready to go, normally we can deploy your applications the next day and at a much lower cost than traditional computing and colocation.

Figure 1 shows a very simple schematic of the Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service.

Figure 1: Simple Virtual Hosting Configuration