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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2012
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    Cambridgeshire
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    * Cloud vs. Dedicated Machines

    Hi All,

    Just wanted to try and get all your advice on some further progress we're looking at taking in the following months. Currently, we run dedicated servers standalone, with VPS's and cPanel environments for all our clients, but, we're looking at growing the system and converting our Dedicated servers into a Cloud, either OpenStack or CloudStack.. We're moving more towards CloudStack at the moment.. But just wanted to see if anyone had any experience with doing this, and whether you recon it will be worth the effort and expense to set up the cloud in the first place, all for the HA / Failover and rapid expandability..

    Cheers!

    Steve @ MTH.
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  2. #2
    dedicated machines are way better, they have powerful
    ram and processor
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Nov 2004
    Location
    India
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    1,104
    Hi Steve,

    Apache cloudStack continues to gain rapid adoption with large scale deployments around the world and its free. If you have a plan to run VM's like Cpanel / Plesk better option would be going with Basic Networking mode in Cloudstack. Also you need at-least 3 servers (minimum) to go live and later you can add more hypervisor nodes based on your requirement.

    Cloudstack do support bare-metal node so you can provide both physical and Virtual provisioning for your clients.
    AssistanZ - Beyond Boundaries...
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
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    4,886
    All depends of your customers' demands. If you can sell Cloud instances, it is worth to go and setup any Cloud infrastructure. You'd always start reselling any major Cloud and when and then to setup your own. Just make sure it is worth to spend upfront.
    HostColor.com Edge Infrastructure - US Dedicated Servers & Europe Dedicated Hostingsince 2000
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2012
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    Quote Originally Posted by HostColor View Post
    All depends of your customers' demands. If you can sell Cloud instances, it is worth to go and setup any Cloud infrastructure. You'd always start reselling any major Cloud and when and then to setup your own. Just make sure it is worth to spend upfront.
    We're mainly running VPSes at the moment on a few Dedicated machines, then a few cPanel instances for other clients. Considering converting this setup to cloud based infrastructure, which increases the reliability and then the expandability of the system, rather than inefficiently allocating resources of each server, essentially replacing our current system setup of SolusVM and replacing it with a CloudStack infrastructure.. What would you think?

    Steve @ MTH
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Denver, CO
    Posts
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    We went from dedicated servers to virtual years ago and never looked back. All of our customers were able to migrate over with improved performance and uptime due to the newer hardware and subsequent refreshes only increased this. We have quite a few large customers with private clouds, shared storage, clusters, etc that are loving the "cloud". Personally, I think managing dedicated servers, taking up the rack space, power, etc isn't worth it. Especially with all the various cloud solutions available now.
    Mike Kauspedas - GearHost
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  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Location
    Atanta, GA and Tampa, FL
    Posts
    17

    Cloud . . . the second wave, washing out most dedicated servers . . well eventually

    Yes, we continue to see success with a number of firms I interact with both with the initial P to V (physical to virtual) and then P to C (Physical to Cloud). This dedicated server to Cloud movement is hitting it second wave. And each wave we see getting larger and larger.

    Cloud gives your business a premium, elastic/scalable utility solution to make you more competitive. Organizations also benefit by allowing their valuable IT personnel to focus on the applications that support the business and their customers rather than the underlying plumbing. With a well-built cloud the expert engineers will help you engineer a self-service solution with elastic scaling and use-based pricing that is accessible via the internet.

    While cost advantages are an immediate driver for IT organizations to consider cloud, there are far bigger advantages. Increased business agility improves time to market, customer responsiveness and operational efficiency. In fact, a recent survey found that 75% of the respondents consider business agility as the top driver. Incorporate these benefits when building your business case and educate your key stakeholders and management.

    Also with Cloud platforms, the pooling of resources allows a private infrastructure or service provider to realize a cost savings from reduction of physical assets like server, storage, and network infrastructure required to deliver applications or services. Reduced infrastructure can lead to reduced power consumption and management costs.

    Cloud platforms offer policy-driven self-service characteristics that allow a private infrastructure or service provider to introduce levels of automation that reduce operational costs in delivering IT services, while also allowing standardization, security, and compliance to be more easily implemented and reported on. Cloud consumers, in this scenario, also realize the benefit of obtaining their cloud resources on demand and preventing traditional provisioning delays.

    So static dedicated servers OR Cloud . . . . we as an industry must provide more better solutions, products and services or the Cloud turns hosting into a commodity.
    David Houssian - VP Solutions, Business Development, Sago Networks - daveh@sagonet.com - 813-230-2910
    www.SagoNet.com - Colocation, Dedicated Servers, Datacenters | Broadband/Wireless Internet | Data Transport
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  8. #8
    Join Date
    Oct 2012
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    Quote Originally Posted by ghMike View Post
    We went from dedicated servers to virtual years ago and never looked back. All of our customers were able to migrate over with improved performance and uptime due to the newer hardware and subsequent refreshes only increased this. We have quite a few large customers with private clouds, shared storage, clusters, etc that are loving the "cloud". Personally, I think managing dedicated servers, taking up the rack space, power, etc isn't worth it. Especially with all the various cloud solutions available now.
    Hi ghMike - This is all making us really consider the possibility. In order to gain and push to that next level, we need to be looking into expanding and producing an infinitely scalable system, with failover, such as the Hypervisors and the whole "if one failes, another will take over" system, it seems to be a no brainer - But do we invest now, and grow with it, or wait until we actually have a demand for it, and then invest then, converting all our kit over?

    Steve @ MTH
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  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Denver, CO
    Posts
    124
    The amount of money you save in operational costs and better profit margins are a good reason. Every scenario is different so you will want to run your own numbers and probably poll your customers. We had 3 racks of customers and brought that all down to one rack ... then expanded to more as we grew lol. Originally we went all in, bought blades, SAN, new switches, etc. The benefit for customers was a no brainer. Most of them saved money and got better performance since a lot of them went from slower 7200rpm drives to 15k arrays on the SAN. Faster processors and RAM. And it was a lot easier and a lot less down time to upgrade. Some of them took convincing but all we had to do was p2v, let them test, and they were convinced. We also made the decision to go completely virtual and we stopped offering dedicated and colo space.

    We're working on a new launch now and we're buying enough hardware to start with easy scale out for the future. So we'll have the framework in place and we'll just need to add physical hosts and nodes as we grow.

    I'd recommend that type of step. Don't buy something you have to grow into and will be a money sink. Buy what you need to get started. With orchestration software that is available now (like OnApp) you can add new hosts in minutes. It will literally take us longer to physically rack the host then add it to the cloud.

    <<snipped>>
    Last edited by Postbox; 02-06-2014 at 06:38 PM.
    Mike Kauspedas - GearHost
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  10. #10
    We have been moved to cloud around 6 months ago and that's definitely became my first choice now. It has become far easier to manage our resources since we migrated from dedicated servers to cloud. Moreover cloud technology offers better cost-effective & secure solutions.
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  11. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Denver, CO
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    This is how we looked at it. We can go open source (we looked into OpenStack at that time) or we can stick with Hyper-V (we're primarily a windows shop), but both of those solutions are like buying all the ingredients to a cake and baking it ourselves. We wanted to lower our operating costs, spend less time on maintaining and engineering solutions, and provide true automation for customers. It also had to be HA and scalable. We wanted to just buy a cake. So we went with OnApp (and Azure but that's another story). OnApp has a great API (for our customer control panel), it's not as expensive as something like vmware ($500/month to start), and you get support, free setup and integration, etc.

    CloudStack actually doesn't look that bad and I've heard it's pretty easy as far as cloud orchestration software goes. You can certainly save on licensing. I also know it was backed by Citrix and now Apache, so having some corporate type backing is always good for open source to help push it. But support is going to be community based and without the expertise in house we can't afford something open source to go down at 2am without anyone to call.
    Mike Kauspedas - GearHost
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  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by ghMike View Post
    CloudStack actually doesn't look that bad and I've heard it's pretty easy as far as cloud orchestration software goes. You can certainly save on licensing. I also know it was backed by Citrix and now Apache, so having some corporate type backing is always good for open source to help push it. But support is going to be community based and without the expertise in house we can't afford something open source to go down at 2am without anyone to call.
    CloudStack has been great for us. They also push updates and new features on a decent schedule.
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  13. #13
    i think the trouble of cloud is bandwidth price.
    iweb take 1 USD / 1G bandwidth , that's so much expensive.

    if i buy a dedicated server.
    i have to pay only 100 USD per month for 10TB bw
    HD Wallpaper List Can Make Your Desktop Look Stunning
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