Piers Daniell

I think it is very important when selling a product that the business itself uses whatever it might be. This definitely helps to iron out those annoying issues that a customer may see but also helps to understand the product better. It is something we have always taken very seriously at Fluidata and with our imminent office move thought it would be time to take it to the next level.

At the moment there is a lot of talk about cloud computing, but bringing that story to fruition is taking time, and somewhat frustrating with the conflicting views and different ways of cracking the proverbial nut. For some years we have been successfully delivering Layer-2 private wide area networks to our customers using our PWAN technology, but now we have gone a step further to demonstrate what can be done with it.

I am writing this article at my desk in the office but this actual machine is virtual (ie not installed on my local PC), residing in one of our datacentres. And that is not all - so is everything that my virtual PC talks to such as Exchange, SQL and our intranet. What used to all reside in our office has now made the transition to the datacentre delivering a large number of benefits without the headache you might imagine.

By using the PWAN technology, moving the firewall into the cloud was the first step so that our offices (just opened another outside of London) could communicate on private IP to the datacentres without a VPN (Layer 2). This then meant that office servers could be moved and accessed from the datacentre. IP addressing, Active Directory, DNS etc all now reside in the datacentre and serve our local networks through the PWAN. We then went through the process of virtualising the desktops to VMware’s excellent ESX product so that each desktop is still independent to the other and accessed via the Remote Desktop application.

This leaves us with the latest Windows 7 software on our existing PCs with the flexibility to hot desk to any PC in either of our offices, or anywhere in the world via a VPN to the PWAN. And because the majority of traffic is only mouse clicks, keyboard strokes and screen refreshes, our usage of the network has actually dropped.

We will continue to adapt the virtual network but with the flexibility of our new hosted environment there is an infinite amount of customisation possible. I am sure more businesses will follow our lead when they realise how easily it can be implemented.

I was speaking to a client yesterday on the merits of virtualisation and what needed to be considered before moving his company ‘into the cloud’. A lot has been said in the press and by manufacturers about the benefits of hosting services, however little covers the specific problems that you are inevitably left with. In this client’s case the business was at a junction in terms of IT investment as it evaluated its creaking server infrastructure and to plan the next steps.

With eight separate servers, each carrying out a specific function it was easy to recommend sharing one larger server using something like Vmware to convert each server into a virtual environment. My word of caution came with trying to share resources between servers and better instead to over specify the base machine to ensure each server got exactly what it needed. Modern virtualisation software is clever in sharing resources but in my experience if you have a Microsoft Exchange server gobbling up 4 GB of RAM then it isn’t going to share very well with a Microsoft SQL server requiring the same. Better to ensure there is at least 8 GB on the base machine and allocated 4 to each. The same goes with processors, only hard drives can really be shared, and with RAID, reliably too. So now instead of buying eight cheap servers the client can instead buy one or two (for extra redundancy) high specification servers to carry out the same role.

The next problem is where to host the platform. While the customer knows it should be in the cloud so that it can be accessed from everywhere and highly secure it does mean handing over parts of the business to a third-party. This can be done by fully outsourcing the virtual machines and not even owning the hardware, however without full due diligence what could appear to be a good service today, could fall over when another hundred customers have the same idea. Also no SLA will ever compensate your business should the worse happen so I believe it is better plan as though everything is about to go very wrong. Therefore a good solution would be to collocate some hardware in a datacentre but also maintain a local version and replicate between the two. That way there is maximum resilience should the internet fail, supplier go bust or office burn down.

While the industry will remain very positive on the concept of the cloud it is important not to loose sight of the technical challenges your company will face and how that would impact your ability to do business.