How Managed Private Cloud Can Optimize IT Infrastructure

Hosting and IT infrastructure options have evolved considerably over the last 10 to 15 years (as you’d expect with any technology). The private cloud has emerged as a popular mix of many of the previous options, offering control, security, and versatility. It’s an ideal way to optimize IT infrastructure.

The private cloud offers isolated infrastructure that’s provided by dedicated hardware. It offers security and efficiency that’s light years ahead of a single dedicated server or shared server option. The ability to customize dedicated infrastructure to the needs of an individual workload is an even bigger leap forward.

A managed private cloud means that you don’t have to do all the technical work. You get all the benefits without having to dedicate and train staff for the configuration, maintenance, and ongoing management of the private cloud infrastructure.

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So how does this help to optimize IT infrastructure?

How It Can Optimize IT Infrastructure

The real benefit of managed private cloud is that it’s a way to efficiently optimize IT infrastructure. It ensures:

• Uptime
• Scalability
• Higher performance
• Ease of use

Uptime

In order to optimize IT infrastructure, you need to make sure it’s highly available. No business welcomes downtime for their critical services and applications. Today, more than ever, high availability is increasingly important to businesses of all sizes. Because of this, we designed our Managed Private Cloud solution from top to bottom for high availability.

This is particularly important in three major areas:

1. Unplanned downtime: Failures can happen with any technology infrastructure, but the important part is getting back up. Hardware replacement is great, but that takes time. VMware allows for a quick recovery from outages—just a simple reboot.
2. Planned downtime: In order to maintain rapid scalability, we design our systems with the extra capacity to handle maintenance and upgrades. That means we can keep everything up to date and working now and in the future without any downtime.
3. Emergency patching: Sometimes you can’t wait for an upgrade. Hardware vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown are becoming more common and no hardware is guaranteed to be immune. With VMware’s flexibility, we can deploy those patches with minimal impact to your critical systems.

Scalability

One of the main advantages to Managed Private Cloud is being able to scale to meet demand.

• Add guest instances on demand and spin them down when they’re no longer needed. We do offer this through our support channels since it is a managed platform.
• You can increase resources to individual hosts, add nodes, or increase SAN storage when you need it. It is usually better to spread your resource pool across more machines, but you have the control to do what you need to (we do have hosting expertise available to help you figure out the best approach).
• We monitor cluster resources and will help you plan for growth. It’s always best to build for current needs and be wary of too much oversizing. You want to spread more instances across higher performance hardware.

Performance

Managed Private Cloud needs to deliver. It should be fast and effective, which is why performance is important.

Ease of Use

Finally, a Managed Private Cloud is extremely easy to use.

• You don’t have to re-architect your applications for high availability like you might need to do to take advantage of the public cloud.
• Availability happens at the hardware level, but you can still use other security and availability technology like traditional load balancing and firewalls when necessary.
• We configure and manage the environment for you, so you don’t have to worry about learning VMware.
• No licensing costs for VMware components—there’s a clear base price with no unexpected overages or licensing increases.
• We don’t charge for guest VMs other than licensing and add ons—everything is built into the price. Not being penalized for having a lot of small VMs can open up some new options.

Liquid Web Provides Infrastructure Assessments to Identify Cost Saving and Optimization Opportunities

Kelly has worked in the hosting industry for nearly 16 years and loves seeing clients use new technologies to build businesses and solve problems. His roles in technology have included all facets of Sales and, more recently, Solution Architecture, Technical Sales, and Sales Training. Kelly really loves having a hand in developing new products and helping clients learn how to use them.