Private Clouds for SMEs

A typical small business might have a variety of servers – file servers for document sharing, mail servers, print servers, web servers and the like. Each server is classically a dedicated block of hardware with its own requirements for licencing, maintenance, power, cooling and replacement (servers and their all important hard drives tend to have a warranty of one to three years).

So you have all this kit, wiring, racks and battery backups; it takes up space – often its own air conditioned room whilst the rest of us sweat, creates noise and heat and requires human attendance for upgrades, failures, backups and disaster recovery – quite a big commitment.

Private Clouds are being adopted by the bigger players to mitigate against some of these costs and risk, and the proven solutions are soon to be adopted by SMEs. This letter briefly explains the concept including the benefits and costs, and then there’s a small plug for us, OTG, at the end.

Advantages of a Private Cloud

So people got to thinking – much of the capacity of any given server just isn’t being used 24/7 – can’t we run two, three or even ten servers on the same hardware? And the answer came back: ”No, you can’t”. Developers persisted however, and cloud computing was born. Now – one decent server can a considerable number of clones of your existing servers – identical in all ways except for their lifetime costs.

Here are a few plus points:

• Less power consumption – slim servers that fit in racks consume about half an Amp, and can run ten individual servers on that power – great for your green credentials.

• That reduction in power consumption brings with it a reduction in the need for cooling – more power and expense saved, and less CO2 created.

• Fewer machines mean less maintenance (less time and fewer parts), and less space – server rooms can be *much* smaller.

• Backups become a breeze – each server can be switched off, then copied like a file onto an external hard disk or over the network and then switched on again. The hard disk goes in your fire safe. Disaster recovery likewise is greatly simplified – you can at your leisure copy those machines onto a warm standby machine, verify that they work, and be ready for the worst. And many cloud systems allow you to take snapshots of a server before you do an upgrade for example, so you can rollback quickly if there is a problem.

• Machine maintenance is greatly simplified – need more memory on your fileserver? Use the remote interface to turn it off, add more memory and turn it on – no screwdrivers required. This remote control is so effective that many companies are then comfortable to have their machines hosted in a  secure data centre, knowing they have direct and full control via something as small as a net book from anywhere in the world where there’s broadband.

Disadvantages of a Private Cloud

• Some clouds cost money to licence (Microsoft charge per machine hosted per year for their offering). However VMWare has a solution that is free and ideal for SMEs – VMWare has 80% market share and has been in the game ten years – unsurprisingly it is our preferred solution.

• USB devices – like cameras, phones and some printers – are not easily accessible from remote machines – generally you would install your camera software on your laptop directly. Network printers etc remain unaffected.

• Whilst they require considerably less maintenance, they do need setting up in the first place, and your machines will need placing in the Cloud (a process called ‘virtualisation’ – they become ‘virtual machines’). So they do need skilled staff to create, but not to maintain.

So why are they called Private Clouds?

The term Cloud comes from network diagrams where the internet is traditionally denoted by a cloud symbol. Private – well, it’s yours and yours alone. We need this distinction as there is the more generic ‘Cloud Computing’ offered by world powers like Amazon and Google where you put your systems in their hands via an intermediary and dispense entirely with hardware. A big step perhaps – our preferred approach is to adopt a Private Cloud solution first, as once your machines are happily in your Cloud, it is easy to move them into The Cloud (and back, if needed).

What’s the catch? Price, right?

Well, the cost is proportional to the work needed to create your Cloud and then to move your existing machines into it (i.e. man hours). Thereafter – VMWare is free, so the costs are simply the reduced time that you would spend doing backups and DR, plus the usual individual server maintenance (Windows upgrades and the like). If you feel like dispensing with all your clutter of equipment altogether and having a quieter, cooler office, then renting some rack space in a Data Centre for your new Private Cloud is a very cost effective solution.

Where do we go from here?

Well, the first step would be to confirm what we have said – bit of Googling perhaps – and then contact us for a free chat about your current set-up. We chose to do this for ourselves a while back (we are a software house based in London) and can see the clear cost and time benefits that the simplification has brought.

Phil Hanchet

OTG