CLOUD COMPUTING SOLUTIONS

There is a lot of hype surrounding the buzzword 'CLOUD COMPUTING'. Its really nothing new. When you are dealing with complex things such as computer technology, its hard to be the expert in all things yourself. And what is more frustrating is that the technology is changing everyday. So once you master one factor of your IT infrastructure, you are racing to catch up with what just changed. With more and more of 21st century business being done by computers, from our phone systems to our ordering, to accounting, manufacturing control, client interfaces, etc. its enough to drive any organization crazy.

What are your options? Well you could employ a small army of highly paid IT professionals. And invest millions in computer hardware, air conditioned data centers, redundant power backups, etc. Only to find that your network had a small hole in it and some hackers got in and now viruses are running rampant on your servers and networks. Or that someone forgot to check the backups and this was only found after a server went down and there was no backup to be found to restore it. The bottomline is that unless you have the budget to create a full IT infrastructure to support your user and application needs, its a painful process and often these lessons are only learned when its too late.

There are other options, however. With the advent of high speed Internet access, you can let 3rd parties partner with you. They have the infrastructure already. They have staff trained to manage it. They have systems in place for disaster recovery. They have redundancy and they know security. And when compared with the costs of your organization building this whole infrastructure and the ongoing costs of its care & feeding, its no wonder that scores of organizations have decided to outsource their IT services to 3rd parties.

Edgeneering are trustworthy experts in Cloud Computing. With clients in large government agencies in multiple states, large corporate clients including major international newspapers, international manufacturers and even small/medium businesses, we've learned over the years how to ensure high uptime reliability, and yet ensure the client's data needs are well cared for. Since we typically host and manage applications that we have developed ourselves, its no wonder that we would know the best way to get the maximum performance from these applications and ensure data is well cared for and protected from harm.

Our infrastructure is based in Phoenix, Arizona. Its an ideal place for a data center. Yes, its hot. But computers all get air conditioners anyway. With our nuclear power facilities powering the city of Phoenix, lack of exposure to earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, distance from coastal areas, we are well suited to the needs of computer servers. Our data center has redundant backup, five (5) separate incoming optical fiber Internet connections for redundancy, and all servers are protected by the latest security facilities. We use Linux as our primary operating system environment, and take advantage of the stable and fast virtualization technology from VMWare for our servers. All servers are high grade Dell hardware clusters, with redundancy and complete image backups over our LAN to network attached storage.

And if that's not enough, we have redundant data center facilities in Indianapolis and Missouri. Our uptime records are incredible. If you would like to get reports on our uptime by independent 3rd party monitoring service BasicState.com, just let us know and we'd be happy to provide them.

Leveraging 'Green' Technology

We've been doing this for quite some time now - probably well before it was considered a 'fashionable' thing to do. It actually just makes perfect sense. We take advantage of virtualization technologies from VMWare on our servers. We did this simply because it is easier to manage and restore server images this way, but more importantly it allows one high powered server to run 10-15 lowered powered server instances at the same time. This means that one computer hardware investment has an incredible return to us, because we simply just build 10-15 CentOS server images, install a lot of RAM in the server and then run all the servers in parallel.

This isn't anything new. Virtualization like this has been around for a while now. But we're living proof of its reliability and performance. Our experience shows that it is far more reliable that pure hardware hosting, simply because all issues relating to driver problems with hardware are taken care of once, and then all server images share the one Hypervisor abstraction of the hardware. They all work just fine with these virtual drivers, and in fact the drivers are so well optimized that we've found our server installations done this way far outperform a single server - even if there were 8 servers running on the same box, at the same time!

We take advantage of Western Digital 'Green' tech hard drives in our RAID drive arrays to keep power consumption down. We've seen a drop of (on average) 1 Amp per server by doing this, and when you host the number of servers that we host, that's a big difference. With no performance drop at all. That's technology for you - more power, less power consumption and more performance for the same money.

And we're constantly experimenting with new ways to increase yield from our servers, without further power drain. Its an ongoing journey, but its great for us, great for the planet and great for our customers.

Security is not an after-thought

Sometimes you really have to go through a few security attacks to realize just how important it is to be proactive to security. When we install a server and put it into a rack, we know that we are exposing every weakness that the server, its operating system and the software running on it, along with the end users use of the server, to the world. A world in which organized crime, black hat hackers and malicious government bodies bent on breaking in want a piece of. We are constantly auditing our systems and ensure that not only are our systems PCI compliant for eCommerce, but they are also updated with the latest intrusion detection technologies, anti-virus & malware, etc. We know all attack vectors and monitor them for weakness.

We take advantage of stable and secure Linux operating systems such as CentOS and use peer reviewed and solid IDS/Firewalls in addition to local firewalls in front of our servers. Rather than providing an open door to hackers, all access to our servers are done through VPNs even for our own staff, and we monitor and check all incoming threat attacks to open ports through IPCop firewall technology.

If we detect any foreign application has entered our network, the system is immediately quarantined and locked down. As we have redundancy, we can simply re-route access to servers around that machine while it is addressed. This not only contains any threat, but allows us the correct amount of time to diagnose what has happened and to prevent it from happening again. So far, we only experience about 1 adverse event like this a year, and this frequency is reducing every year as well. We feel its a sign that we are better prepared for the danger of cyber wars, digital terrorism and organized crime than most.

We have even been called upon on numerous occassions to offer our services in computer forensics to assist others than have not been so lucky on their networks. We assist law enforcement at all levels where possible.