Looking for a Managed Cloud hosting provider - Windows application stack

Sapphiron

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Hi All

I am currently looking for a cloud hosting provider. one of the main issues I have with most of the cloud hosting providers is the lack of flexibility in their offerings. For example, they cant give me a mix of SSD and HDD storage in the same VM. Sometimes not even in 2 different VM's

The provider has to be local, as the latency of international solutions is just too bad.

Here is a summary of our requirements

We distribute 2 cloud based applications. Our company handles the Sales, distribution, implementation and support for clients. The development companies are separate companies, but they are looking to us to handle cloud infrastructure on their behalf.

The first application uses a Microsoft ASP.net stack on IIS with a MS SQL back end. We expect to have about 40 to 80 client instances by the end of next year. Ideally we require pure SSD storage for this application. Ideally we like a High-availability cluster between Cape Town and Johannesburg. i.e. 2 web servers and 2 database servers with data replication for rapid recovery

The second application is a customised application stack with a MySQL database backend running on a ubuntu 14.04 VM. We currently have about 80-100 VM's that we would potentially migrate in a phased manner. Each instance would require about 2GB to 16GB of RAM and 50 to 500GB of Storage, with a 1:5 ratio of SSD vs HDD storage.

For both solutions we would require an offsite backup solution, with a recover to remote location option. We need both automated and ad-hoc backups.

In terms of Server maintenance, would like to do as little as possible. Ideally, we only want to take care of our applications and our clients. The less we need to build and maintain the better.
 
My suggestion is to contact Internet Solutions regarding what you require, note that they wont be cheap but you get what you pay for.
 
I am more than confident domains can built you custom solution (won't be cheap, but it can be done)
 
I am more than confident domains can built you custom solution (won't be cheap, but it can be done)
internet solutions have spent in excess of 10Mil on their cloud platform which is spread across multiple data centers.
 
Doesn't change my post

Hosting a VPS is not the same as hosting a proper cloud offering, with guarantee's on things like IOPS / HA / DRS etc.

You're probably a bit out of your depth commenting here, but maybe I'm wrong. Do you even know what virtualization platform domains.co.za are running off, what the backed storage is etc? Or are you merely commenting without thinking again? :twisted: :whistle:
 
We had similar requirements and went with EOH Cloud Services. Let me know if you want the contact details of the business development manager we dealt with.
 
Hosting a VPS is not the same as hosting a proper cloud offering, with guarantee's on things like IOPS / HA / DRS etc.

You're probably a bit out of your depth commenting here, but maybe I'm wrong. Do you even know what virtualization platform domains.co.za are running off, what the backed storage is etc? Or are you merely commenting without thinking again? :twisted: :whistle:
Assumptions galore. You do not even know me, what I do or what I own yet you always seem to think I know nothing.
 
Assumptions galore. You do not even know me, what I do or what I own yet you always seem to think I know nothing.

Your posts related to your little VM shows how little you actually know about servers/virtualization/cloud so his comments are not far off...
 
Look into Cipherwave,

+1, pay their DC a visit to see what its all about.
We have a few servers with them, some highlights:

- Full windows stack for their cloud: System Center and their are working on an Azure Pack deployment.
- Huge retention of daily VM level backups which are held offsite on tape.
- Live replication of our solution (at a premium) from their DC in Midrand to Terraco Isando for BDR.
- Actual server hardware: Dell and HP hardware (blades) backed by HP 3par SAN running enterprise SSDs*. We saw a server on a tour which has 1TB+ RAM

*Too many "cloud" providers run consumer disks on sh*t whitelable hardware using *nix stack.

I am all for going the OpenStack route if you are capable of supporting it but you need to be very careful who you trust with tour production workloads, Afrihost and Mweb have had major issues in their so called "cloud" environments with the latter loosing entire servers.
 
Assumptions galore. You do not even know me, what I do or what I own yet you always seem to think I know nothing.

Yet several people with first hand experience, some that do this as a living, are disagreeing with you. Yet you're still adamant you know whats cracking.

There's strength in knowing what you don't know.
 
You're probably a bit out of your depth commenting here, but maybe I'm wrong. Do you even know what virtualization platform domains.co.za are running off, what the backed storage is etc? Or are you merely commenting without thinking again? :twisted: :whistle:

weirdly enough, I do :)

KVM as the hypervisor of choice and OnApp as the cloud orchestration.
We use OnApp's distrubuted storage as a redundant backend for both SSD and SATA SAN's with 2 copy, 2 stripe (raid 10 over distributed storage).
HP 5700 Flexfabric 10Gbit switches with 40Gbit uplinks
SuperMicro FatTwin Servers
E5-2600v3/v4 processors
Crucial / Samsung DDR3 / DDR4 RAM.


Dave @ Domains.co.za
 
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weirdly enough, I do :)

KVM as the hypervisor of choice and OnApp as the cloud orchestration.
We use OnApp's distrubuted storage as a redundant backend for both SSD and SATA SAN's with 2 copy, 2 stripe (raid 10 over distributed storage).
HP 5700 Flexfabric 10Gbit switches with 40Gbit uplinks
SuperMicro FatTwin Servers
E5-2600v3/v4 processors
Crucial / Samsung DDR3 / DDR4 RAM.


Dave @ Domains.co.za

See, now you can answer the questions I asked.

Thor has no idea about anything behind the scenes and is blindly preaching. It becomes mildly annoying!

Are you offering multiple locations at this point?
 
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See, now you can answer the questions I asked.

Thor has no idea about anything behind the scenes and is blindly preaching. It becomes mildly annoying!

Are you offering multiple locations at this point?

At this point no, our cloud infrastructure is in Teraco Isando.
We've had some discussing internally about offering multiple locations, we just need to find the right commercial model for it.
 
At this point no, our cloud infrastructure is in Teraco Isando.
We've had some discussing internally about offering multiple locations, we just need to find the right commercial model for it.

Fair enough. Onapp looks interesting - however SolusVM doesn't have the best reputation...

How are you finding Onapp for the KVM bits and what made you pick it over something like oVirt? Is it mainly billing integration or is it just more polished?
 
Fair enough. Onapp looks interesting - however SolusVM doesn't have the best reputation...

How are you finding Onapp for the KVM bits and what made you pick it over something like oVirt? Is it mainly billing integration or is it just more polished?

SolusVM is only for VPS's and was bought out by OnApp a year or so ago.

We've found onapp itself (the cloud product) to be good (for KVM), like any software it has it's quirks, but their support is absolutely outstanding.

As for why we picked it, you could build out an Openstack system to essentially do exactly what OnApp does, but this does require a lot of man hours and development to essentially re-invent the wheel. We prefer having a dedicated company who's whole business revolved around cloud orchestration like OnApp doing this development stuff while we focus on what are good at, which is the infrastructure and management.
 
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