Unrivalled flexibility and scalability coupled with unsurpassed reliability: that's what business connectivity and solutions provider MWEB Business is bringing to business computing in South Africa, with the introduction of innovative, cost-effective Hosted Virtual Server solutions.
Bernard Kur, Head of Product Management and Development at MWEB Business, says the new Hosted Virtual Server offerings complement MWEB Business's recently expanded range of high-specification, low-cost hosted server products.
According to Kur, Hosted Virtual Servers are designed for businesses that need the stability and redundancy of a high-end server, but don't have the large budget required for a fully redundant server.
“With a Hosted Virtual Server, they get the redundancy they need at an affordable, easy-to-justify cost,” he explains.
“MWEB Business's Virtual Servers offer 99.9% uptime as they have full hardware redundancy. If any hardware crashes, it automatically and seamlessly fails over to redundant hardware, which is already allocated within our Virtual Server environment.”
MWEB Business's Hosted Virtual Server offerings are also ideal for businesses that need high levels of processing power for only a short period - for example, to cope with a large bill run at the end of the month, or to deal with a promotion that is being run on their Web server.
MWEB Business allows customers to “burst” their hardware capacity for short periods of time when required - and only charges them for the additional use rather than for a full server.
It also provides an ideal solution for application testing, all of which can be done in the virtual environment without impacting on the business's ongoing operations.
Businesses that require scalability as their environment grows will also benefit from MWEB Business' Hosted Virtual Server offering as they can select the hardware they require initially - and then scale up at any time with no extended downtime or compatibility issues.
The virtual nature of the solution enables businesses to customise their hardware and amend their server specifications remotely via the MWEB Business MyAccount portal. They can increase the memory, add additional vCPUs, hard drive space and add or remove additional virtual servers, without any extra paperwork or delays.
An additional function built into the offering is a “snapshot” feature, which allows customers to make a copy of the current configuration and data of the virtual server, and then implement changes or updates with the knowledge that they can change their configuration and revert to their environment at the time they took the snapshot. If the changes they have implemented do not work, or if the system crashes, customers can simply revert to the snapshot.
“Another of the key benefits of our Hosted Virtual Servers is that they can be implemented quickly and effortlessly, as there is no physical hardware requirement,” Kur adds.
MWEB Business's Hosted Virtual Server environment
Virtual servers are created by partitioning several large physical servers into multiple virtual servers. This is done in such a way that the Virtual Servers behave and appear as if they are separate physical machines. Each Virtual Sever can have its own operating system installed that can be rebooted independently.
MWEB Business uses high specification Dell servers, which are connected to the MWEB SAN environment.
Because it is easy to add additional servers to the Virtual Server environment without disrupting any other services, MWEB Business can easily increase its Virtual Server capacity by adding additional servers to the environment, allowing several more virtual servers to be created with no downtime.
Similarly, when servers are outdated and become redundant, they can be removed from the environment with no disruptions.
MWEB Business currently offers eight customisable Virtual Server Hosting packages, ranging from R330 incl VAT to R1 150 incl VAT, depending on hardware specifications and software options. Customers can choose between two operating systems: Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 2008 Server. Each MWEB Business's Hosted Virtual Server offering comes with no set-up fees and uncapped traffic at no additional cost.
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