Trouble-free scaling

With many traditional virtual private servers, scaling introduces as many problems as benefits. For instance, what happens when a "hungry-neighbour" demands more resources from your shared server? What happens when your virtual space expands beyond the resources available from one single node? Often the client must migrate their applications and data to a new environment or service provider or restructure their application architecture to accomodate expansion. In the case of contraction, you could be left with having to pay for infrastructure and resources that you no longer need.

Our Virtual Grid Server, based on AppLogic Grid technology, offers all the benefits of scaling without storing up trouble for you further down the line. Resources that are assigned to your VGS are reserved for you and protected against other customers that are using the same physyical node. Assigning additional resources to your VGS is a simple and rapid support request which triggers the AppLogic grid controller to check the current node you are on for available resources and if insufficient resources remain, the controller will migrate your VGS to another node.

But that's just the start of the Grid's capabilities for resource distribution. Even within your VGS service we can assign specific resources to individual appliances (e.g. mysql, backup, or firewall appliances) which could all exist on seperate physical nodes throughout the Grid. This ensures that your VGS can scale, trouble-free and well beyond the limits of one physical node. In fact the only real limitation is that the resources assigned to one single appliance cannot exceed the resources available on a physical node.

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Total reliability

For every GB of VGS space that we sell to you, we reserve another GB for Grid-wide 1:1 mirroring of all volumes. This ensures that no mater what catastrophe may befall the hardware on which your VGS resides, we are always ready to redeploy your service elsewhere on the Grid within minutes. You may also request a Backup appliance with your VGS, at no additional charge, that provides you with seperate storage space for your data and SnapShot backups. Our optional SnapShot service ensures that your entire application configuration can be rolled-back in emergencies.

DNS Europe's Data Center provider is Interxion (www.interxion.com), a leading Tier 3 European-wide, carrier-neutral data center provider with extremely high up-time guarantees. Our primary facility is in London, UK where we are linked to two Tier 1 backbone carriers (Level3 and Cogent) to ensure that every layer of the physical infrastructure is redundant.

For customers who have very specific requirements beyond our standard reliability measures, for instance mirrored cloud-connected Grids spanning multiple geographic locations or full Grid dissaster recovery sites, our solution design team are available to discuss our additional capabilities.

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Recession-proof hosting

For many of our customers the decision to migrate to our Grid service is based on the cold, hard, financial fact that by switching to virtualised infrastructure components for load-balancers, firewalls, NAS storage, etc. they are able to reduce their monthly hosting spend by as much as 50% over the traditional hardware-based hosted infrastructure model. These savings are due largely to hosting virtualised components (or appliances) on cost-effective commodity server hardware and ensuring you only pay for the hosted resources that you actually need.

One of the greatest selling points of AppLogic is that almost any existing Linux application can run on this platform (Windows support is expected during Q1 of 2009). This means that customers can migrate to our platform with relative ease and should future circumstances dictate, they will find it equally possible to migrate away from the AppLogic platform.

For those customers who are expecting lean times ahead followed by renewed growth, they can be confident that they have chosen a platform that will scale up and down, cost effectively, painlessly and without compromising your future options.

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Complex applications

Virtual Grid Servers should not necessarily be viewed as a small-scale hosting solution. Multiple VGS resources can become part of an N-tier application deployment with various component appliances existing on different VGS 'containers'. Each of these VGS containers and appliances can be assigned differing resource levels and each is automatically deployed to Grid nodes based on available resource allocation.

Since each appliance or component of an N-tier application can be assigned to seperate physical nodes, the humble VGS then becomes simply part of a much larger multi-node complex application infrastructure. For example, for an additional level of security, you may wish to locate your virtual firewall appliance within its own VGS container which acts as a highly secure and configurable gateway to the rest of your system. At the same time your mission critical application, database and web server appliances can be segregated from less resource-hungry components such as forums or mail servers.

Ultimately the upgrade path is from multiple VGS hosted on our Grid to your own Grid (or Virtual Data Cener: VDC). With your own VDC, the entire flexibility and system design tools that AppLogic has to offer become yours to exploit using nothing more than a web browser interface.

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Full-service outsourcing

DNS Europe specialises is in managing AppLogic Grids and Grid-based systems. Our included basic support package is designed to provide you with confidence in your hosted environment whilst leaving control fully in your hands. For customers who require full outsourcing of system administration skills so that they can focus exclusively on the application development layer, we also offer full system administration management at extremely competitive rates.

For customers who absolutely must retain control of their hosting environment in-house, we offer remote install, maintenance and support services for AppLogic grids anywhere in the World. We will provide you (or your infrastructure partner) with detailed advice, specifications and instructions on how to prepare the physical aspects of the Grid and then entirely remotely we can setup, license and manage your Grid for you.

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