For about 2 years now BVA has developed and tested an offering that allows organization the opportunity to move their physical servers off-site into the cloud. There are several advantages with this type of architecture that really helps business grow and increase their overall up-time and satisfaction. This offering is important for BVA as well as organization here in the valley. The days of replacing physical servers are over for the small to medium size businesses. It’s important to reevaluate your long term strategy so that it falls in line with what is going on in the technology world. Too many times do we see organization’s continue with the old-line of technology due to inexperience and lack of confidence in change. This offering that BVA has decided to adopt, truly leverages virtualization in a very robust and redundant infrastructure. This offering is housed at a local data-center that is a tier 1 facility. The virtual cluster/farm is roughly 40 physical servers hosts leveraging the VMware virtualization platform. This offering can provide a public and private cloud solution. Both solutions are very reliable and offer a 100% SLA on hardware up-time which is quite beneficial and worth the cost associated for this type of infrastructure architecture. This environment has redundant switches, firewalls, power, and bandwidth. There are three different ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) which allow true redundancy when it comes to back-bone connectivity.
The biggest difference between the two offerings is pretty straight forward:
- Public Cloud Server – a host environment that is a 40 physical server environment that is not dedicated to your organization
- Private Cloud Server – a host environment that is a 3 physical server environment that is dedicated to your organization
The cost is really aggressive and I feel its realistic for a small to medium size business looking for advanced IT solutions. Here is a great example of the cost structure because it is varied depending on the specifications needed via physical server.
- 2 Processors, 2GB of RAM, 250GB of 15k rpm Disks = $350/Month
- 4 Processors, 8GB of RAM, 250GB of 15k rpm Disks = $610/Month
- 4 Processors, 16GB of RAM, 350GB of 15k rpm Disks = $950/Month
