Parallels® Cloud Server Case Study

Parallels ® Cloud Server Case Study Business and Partner Summary ServInt is a pioneering provider of high-reliability, managed cloud hosting services for enterprises worldwide. Founded in Northern Virginia in 1995, ServInt provides a range of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated server packages to hosting service resellers, web designers, developers, and online businesses in more than 130 countries. Business Challenges As a major hoster, ServInt stores a vast amount of data. The company was looking for a storage solution that was more reliable and scaled better than both direct attached storage (DAS) and network storage options, such as storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS). While DAS offers fast performance, it is limited by the

number of disks a server can accommodate. And if the disks cannot keep up with the throughput, the only option is to move up to faster disks, which means losing the investment made in existing hardware. DAS also makes it difficult to migrate customers to a different server without incurring downtime. In addition, with DAS, servers become single points of failure, since if a server goes down, access to the data stored on its disks is lost. Finally, DAS requires hosters to maintain low customer densities on each server in order to ensure enough resources for all customers. Yet hosters’ profitability is directly related to the number of customers they can put on a server without incurring performance degradation. Network storage was also not a good answer for ServInt. Although network storage solutions do scale more easily than DAS, they are slower. Hardware- based network storage solutions are also much more expensive—and once a new generation comes out, they become obsolete and have to be replaced, further increasing costs. ServInt also looked at software-based SAN solutions. Although less expensive than hardware-based SAN, these offered poorer performance and reliability. “When you add the other pieces needed to ensure high performance and reliability, software-based SAN ends up being about as expensive as hardware- based SAN,” said Matt Loschert, ServInt’s CTO. As for other software-based storage technologies, ServInt found that they didn’t have the full range of features the company required. And even if ServInt had been willing to put in the development and integration work needed to add the missing features, these solutions still wouldn’t have had the necessary reliability or flexibility. Business Situation Summary ServInt needed a cost-effective storage and virtualization solution that offered great performance, easy migration, high reliability, and high customer density on each server. Neither DAS nor network storage solutions were able to meet its needs. ServInt was also looking for improvement in its virtualization capabilities. Solution Summary ServInt found what it was looking for in Parallels Cloud Server, which combines a flexible, extensible cloud storage solution with both container-based and hypervisor-based virtualization. Parallels Cloud Storage, the storage component of Parallels Cloud Server, separates storage from computing resources, aggregating disk drives across multiple computers in a cluster and creating a high performance, high reliability, scalable storage pool from existing hardware resources. Benefits Summary • Great performance • Easy scalability • More efficient use of hardware • Easy, fast...

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