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Some of Your Common Cloud Hosting Questions Answered

Brian P. Weaver, VP of Sales here at NSA, often gets asked a lot questions regarding cloud hosting. In an effort to provide our clients with as much helpful information as possible, Brian is sharing the most common cloud hosting questions along with his answers.

WHAT IS CLOUD HOSTING?

Traditional IT infrastructures leverage physical servers on-premise to host an enterprise environment. These servers are expensive, difficult to maintain, and limited by the maximum capacity designed by the manufacturer. Increasing resources is a challenge that can require anything from advanced networking, to a complete architecture re-design.

Cloud hosting is an alternative that instead offloads much of the architecture design and maintenance to a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). As a CSP, NSA has created a high-capacity, multi-tenant environment that can act as a remote server room. Rather than hosting high-cost servers and re-designing architecture around growing resource needs, NSA allows partners to organically grow their environment at any time for a predictable monthly recurring cost.

WHAT DOES CLOUD HOSTING DO FOR YOU?

NSA’s highly available, fault-tolerant IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) environment has been designed to maximize performance and uptime. Enterprise-grade hardware based on Cisco Compute Resources and Tintri hybrid flash storage delivers consistently high performance for each tenant. Our technicians manage the maintenance, upgrades and security of the underlying infrastructure. This means that downtimes due to hardware upgrades are a thing of the past.

HOW IS CLOUD HOSTING MANAGED BY NSA?

When a client orders a cloud hosting environment, NSA does the heavy lifting for you in order to seamlessly transition your physical to a hosted infrastructure. NSA provisioning technicians create an isolated instance in vCloud Director, the web-facing access interface for the cloud hosting system. From vCloud Director, The NSA technical team can create VMs and assign compute resources (CPU and RAM), then create virtual disks for storage.

Your new hosted environment is fully tested prior to final cut-over. Cloud hosting environments support a wide variety of operating systems and network options, so compatibility with existing architecture is rarely an issue.

HOW DOES CLOUD HOSTING WORK?

NSA uses layers of technology to provide access to an underlying hardware infrastructure. NSA offers multiple hosting options and works with your team to determine the best hosting solution specific to your company. A cloud host is a single cluster of resources that is controlled by a host Operating System installation. These hosts are networked together for high redundancy, and together are all controlled in turn by the vCloud Director cloud orchestrator software. NSA, as your cloud Service Provider (CSP) also provides network access by working directly with Internet Service Providers and utilizing high-capacity network hardware. The Cisco-based network architecture allows technicians to assign bandwidth and external IPs from a pool to each partner’s environment.

HOW DO I GET STARTED WITH HOSTING?

NSA has resources to help end users get started designing and provisioning their first cloud hosting environment. An initial call to understand your current on-premise infrastructure environment, future growth plans, and anticipated compute loads and security requirements. From this information, NSA will provide our best fit recommendation for your company.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE?

To learn more about your hosting options, public vs private cloud, and what your company should consider to determine the best option for your company, contact our team for a free discovery call.

 

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