CONNECTRIA INSIGHT - MANAGED HOSTING
e-NEWSLETTER
February 2008
In This Issue
-- Welcome To Our New Clients
-- Connectria Completes SAS 70 Type II Audit
-- Practical Tips For VMware Hosting & Virtualization
-- Employee Spotlight: David Wilderman
Greetings,
Welcome to this issue of the Connectria Insight. As
2008 kicks off we look forward to being an important
component of your IT strategy. This issue provides an
update on the status of our SAS 70 certification and
highlights our hosting solutions for virtualized
environments. Virtualization is receiving a lot of press
coverage at this time and it can allow for many
benefits including server consolidation, high
availability, workload consolidation and more. Please
let us know if we can be a part of your strategy to utilize
virtualization in meeting your corporate objectives.
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW CLIENTS
We are very pleased to welcome
these companies as new Connectria customers. We
would especially like to thank all of our references who
spoke on our behalf about their experiences with
Connectria.
Coupled Products,
Manufacturer and Assembler of Engineered Fluid
Routing Products
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Nebraska Book, Operator of 250
College Bookstores & Distributor of
Textbooks
Octagon Research, Leader in the
Electronic Transformation of Clinical R&D
Paramount Studios, Global
Producer and Distributor of Filmed Entertainment
Table Mountain Casino, Gaming,
Entertainment and Dining in Friant, CA |
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CONNECTRIA COMPLETES SAS 70 TYPE II AUDIT
After Connectria was awarded SAS 70 Type I
certification, we began the process for achieving SAS
70 Type II certification. We have succesfully
completed the SAS 70 Type II audit, which covers
operating effectiveness over a period of time. Delivery
of the completed audit report will document the SAS
70 Type II certification. An internationally-recognized
auditing benchmark, SAS 70 is the standard
developed by the American Institute of Certified Public
Accountants (AICPA) to help companies identify
service organizations that comply with defined
business processes and audit standards. The audit
validates Connectria's stringent standards for its
control objectives, which generally include controls
over information technology and related processes.
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PRACTICAL TIPS FOR VMWARE HOSTING & VIRTUALIZATION
Because Connectria has provided VMware hosting
since 2005, we've gained significant experience in
what types of environments are best suited for
virtualization. As many of you begin to explore whether
virtualization is right for you, we wanted to provide
some practical "rules of thumb" to consider. Whether
virtualization is right for you will depend upon your
application mix, along with your strategy,
requirements, budget and ability to benefit from a
virtualized environment.
Some of the major benefits that VMware ESX
virtualization can provide include better hardware
utilization, along with making capacity planning, high-
availability & disaster recovery much simpler to
deliver.
It's important to note, however, that running VMware
ESX is not inexpensive, and can add another layer of
complexity when supporting a server environment.
Not all environments are good candidates for
virtualization.
The following environments typically make good
candidates for virtualization using VMware ESX:
- When you have large number of fairly small
Windows or Linux environments with low resource
requirements. These can typically be hosted virtually
on a small number of physical servers running
VMware.
- Test environments where you need to take servers
up and down often.
- Server environments that have moderate resource
requirements that also need high-availability or
disaster recovery. In those environments, you can
implement a VMware cluster of servers - allowing
virtual machines to move from one server to another
seamlessly.
The following environments typically do
not make good candidates for
virtualization:
- Server environments that are very resource
intensive as virtualization can add another layer that
can hinder performance. Resource intensive server
environments, though, can make good candidates if
(a) they have been tested and found to perform well,
and (b) you can justify using VMware to setup a high-
availability clustered architecture where your server
can failover easily to another like server.
- Java environments that are resource intensive.
Presently, Java Virtual Machines do not run particularly
well in VMware environments - primarily because
Java is already a virtual environment. By adding
VMware, you're adding another layer of virtualization
that often hurts Java performance.
- Servers that have very specific hardware
requirements, such as those that require a specific
kind of board, adapter card, or controller. Often, these
do not have VMware drivers.
Some of the caveats to consider in virtual
environments are:
- In order to be able to move virtual machines from
one server to another effectively (using VMware's
VMotion component), all of the servers will need to be
connected to a high-performance Storage Area
Network (typically attached via fiber-channel) and all of
the servers must use like hardware - including using
the same generation of processor chipsets. (You
cannot mix quad-core and dual-core CPUs, for
example.)
- When running virtual servers it can be easy to
have "hot spots" where network, processor, or disk
resources get overloaded because they are being
shared. Disks, disk controllers and network links can
be especially vulnerable. Careful consideration
should be given to performance characteristics of
each environment upfront, and continual performance
monitoring needs to occur to watch for bottlenecks.
The ability to move a virtual machine from one physical
server to another sounds good in theory, until you
create a bottleneck that hurts performance on multiple
virtual servers.
- While you will typically have less physical servers
using VMware, you will still have the same number
of "logical" servers, each of which will need to be
backed-up, monitored and managed. So while some
of the hardware goes away, the administration effort to
manage them does not go away.
Click Here To Learn More About
Connectria's VMware Hosting Services |
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EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT: DAVID WILDERMAN
David Wilderman is a Senior Systems Engineer for
Connectria and a Microsoft Certified Systems
Engineer (MCSE). David graduated with a B.S. in
Computer Science from Illinois State University in
Bloomington, IL. Prior to working at Connectria David
worked in the printing and pre-press industry for
fourteen years as a Systems Engineer. David is
responsible for all aspects of Microsoft servers at
Connectria. He has extensive experience with SQL
Server, IIS/Web Server technologies, Exchange, Citrix
and Clustering/High-Availability solutions. In addition
to taking care of the servers he is involved with the
licensing through the Services Provider License
Agreement (SPLA) that Connectria has with Microsoft
to license operating systems and applications. David
is married and has 3 daughters, Katherine who's
nine, Sara who's six, and the most recent addition last
December is Chloe. In his spare time, he coaches his
daughter's soccer team in the Spring and Fall. |
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On behalf of all of us at Connectria, we thank you for
your interest. Please contact us if we can be of any
service to you.
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CONTACT INFORMATION
phone:
1-800-781-7820
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