Virtual hosting claims to completely eliminate planned downtime – but are the bigger unplanned disasters something that we should worry about, or does redundancy really have our data covered?
North of Seattle in Washington lives Microsoft’s giant data centre. Like any other giant data centre, it was room after room of servers, all being suitably cooled. A nearby hydroelectric plant supplied the electricity to cool these servers, with two back-up power sources on stand by also. The entire ‘arrangement’, is undoubtedly, impressive. Welcome to the world of virtual hosting.
Although it may seem dramatic to have an entire hydroelectric plant powering the clouds we compute on, this is much more energy efficient than powering individual physical servers. Virtual hosting pools together servers so that we don’t have to power physical ones.
Possible Disasters: What if?
So, what would happen to all our data if Microsoft’s data centre was destroyed in a natural disaster – it’s perfectly plausible? There is a chance that somehow all our clouds could go up in smoke. So what happens next? Does all our data just disappear? Well, actually, no. There is a little thing called “redundancy”, and I don’t mean job cuts and ‘gardening leave’. In the world of computing and virtual hosting, “redundancy” has a much more positive meaning…
Redundancy and Backup
In virtual hosting, you can get 99.9% -100% guaranteed uptime. This is because of redundancy. In computing, definition is entirely different from human resources. In the world of virtual hosting and cloud computing, it refers to the provision of multiple interchangeable components to perform a single function in order to cope with failures and errors. So everything that is stored in Microsoft’s giant data centre will also be stored somewhere else for safekeeping.
In addition to the guaranteed uptime, fast processing speeds and a reliable backup system, virtual hosting can help businesses and individual PC users save money and cut back on energy bills. It is both expensive and time consuming maintaining a physical server. Companies who are still relying on in-house physical servers to deliver an IT infrastructure are likely to source data-backup services as a part of their disaster recovery plan. This is increasingly common with small to medium enterprises, and as more and more business move over to cloud computing, the safer our data becomes in terms of disaster prevention.
99.9% Uptime Guaranteed with SwitchLink
If you would like to find out more about virtual hosting packages for Microsoft or Linux, get in touch with SwitchLink today.
