Engine Networks uses VMware for its virtualization offerings and we thought it would be useful to share some stats on how much consolidation we see in the ‘real world’.

Bear in mind that our sales consultants and engineers tailor solutions primarily for web facing, intensive transactional web systems many with high traffic and peaking around events so what we see is quite different from what might be expected in a more ‘normal’ IT situation (if such a thing exists). We also deal with multiple environments for customers – live/production, pre-production/QA and test – each of which has a different profile.

We manage several hundred VMs today and the average consolidation varies enormously environment to environment. In test environments we see perhaps what you would expect, around 20 VMs per ESX. In pre-production/QA environments we are seeing 8 to 15 VMs per ESX and in live/production environments, the average drops to 5-12 VMs per ESX. This is because most customers see the high availability features of VM as most important in production environments, rather than straight cost savings (although 1:3 or 1:5 is already quite a good saving!). In these cases, a host must be able, at any moment, to handle all the Virtual Machines from another host that is experiencing failure.

Quite a range of results, isn’t it? It shows, to us at least, the need for specialist consultancy and experience to get the best out of your infrastructure. See here for more info.

Tweet This Post

In September, Engine Networks hosted in Torino some important ICT companies from Switzerland and Poland and organized presentations and B2B meetings.

This meeting aims at: supporting the development of new strategies of cooperation between companies; the advantage coming from Engine Networks Virtual Cloud platform.

Tweet This Post

A marketing software as a service company needed a reliable, redundant infrastructure promising security and compliance for guaranteed uptime and compatibility. Engine Networks combined their platform with VMware vCloud, LeftHand SAN technology and HP Blades to create a cost effective, scalable, reliable and compliance solution with VPN to allow communication betweeb customers in-house servers and Engine Networks’ virtual cloud. Learn how Engine Networks built and public and private hybrid cloud solution that met Customers compliance and scale needs.

Tweet This Post

This post is a summary of Incident #045, relating to service unavailability for some part of the Zurich network.

Details:

• Date/Time: The issue started at approximately 7:30PM on Thursday, September 17 2009 and was fully resolved by about 00:30AM on Friday, September 18 2009 Central European Solar Time.

• Symptoms: Some customer residing in our Zurich DataCenter would have experienced network unavailability to the server.

• Impact: This affected some customers on Zurich DataCenter. Customers residing on different DataCenter were unaffected.

• Root Cause: BGP4 flapping. One router started to Flap BGP4 session drive down some of our Networks.

• Takeaways: Both Boarder routers has been checked, fibers cable connected to carriers has been replaced.

• The odds of a recurrence are minimal.

This now concludes this System Incident. If you feel that you are still experiencing the symptoms outlined in this post, please open a support request from the Engine Technology Support Portal.

Tweet This Post

A traditional computing environment includes physical bondage to all the pieces and parts that make up your computing environment, not to mention the daily management and maintenance of your systems, upgrades, patches, etc.

Engine Networks offers the same freedom from the daily management and maintenance of servers most managed hosting providers offer, but Engine Networks is more than just managed hosting. Imagine computing hardware, application platforms, security, industry-specific compliance solutions and inherent redundancy all as accessible, reliable and adjustable as the gas or electricity that heats your home. Simply turn the thermostat up and down to make your home environment more comfortable. With Engine Networks, you can order more power – capacity, redundancy, bandwidth, compliance – on demand. Functionality aside, Engine Networks also offers services other providers can’t deliver: hosted IT environments that are pre-configured and easily customized for fast rollout, and complete, holistic transparency into your system performance.

Tweet This Post

This is a pay-for-what-you-need-when-you-need-it information technology delivery and service model. In essence, Engine Networks is moving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to hardware. With SaaS you pay a monthly fee for Web-based access to a software application. With IaaS you pay a monthly fee for Web-based access to a computing environment that is uniquely configured to your business needs. This might include computing capacity, storage capacity, bandwidth, redundancy, or compliance.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Website traffic fluctuates. Time of day, seasonality, promotions, popularity, and flash crowds can all drive peak volumes. While you can anticipate and plan for some of this volume, few of us guess right all the time.

To complicate matters, your visitors expect steady, fast performance regardless of the traffic your site receives. Building your own infrastructure to handle peak traffic requires capital investment and facilities space – and no matter how big you build it, it still may not be enough. Having to choose between overspending or under-provisioning is a classic dilemma.

But by deploying your web application in the cloud, you can avoid this dilemma. You can eliminate the upfront fixed investment, and still gain access to compute resources to meet peak loads with on demand scalability, while still paying only for the compute time you actually use.

With Engine Networks vCloud, you can deploy your entire web application infrastructure in the cloud – whether you’re developing an entirely new service or enhancing an existing one. Your developers can provision multiple production-scale systems on demand in the cloud – saving time and expense over traditional testing scenarios and enabling faster handoff from development to operations. And if you’re starting a new line of business, you can launch on the web with a robust, state-of-the-art infrastructure without tying up limited capital.

More infos are available here.

Tweet This Post

All member companies were chosen on the basis of strict evaluation parameters, including technology, innovation and project development skills, as well as the presence of a structured staff for the management of business relations with foreign partners.

Tweet This Post