August 4, 2010 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Managed hosting provider
StratoGen believes SHARP™ is the UK’s first truly fixed-price pre-pay cloud hosting model centred around VMWare’s Resource Pool capabilities. SHARP™ guarantees no overspend, improved hosting performance and optimised hosting resource.
SHARP™ enables customers to manage their operational expenditure by hosting their resources on StratoGen’s enterprise-grade VMWare cloud hosting infrastructure. Companies pay for a specified amount of processing power, memory and storage space upfront, on which they can deploy as many virtual machines (VMs) as they need. This gives users greater control over their hosting expenditure and the flexibility to configure their own servers.
SHARP™ vs Metered and per-VM plans
Per-VM hosting plans charge on the number of VMs used to create the customer’s private cloud hosting environment. This is more expensive and offers customers less control of their budget than SHARP™. The metered nature of such hosting plans means customers often experience spikes in their bills. Such charges are measured on the amount of data transferred into and out of the service, or bandwidth used, disk IO (data written to and from), CPU cycles, RAM hours or proprietary ‘compute units’.
Other models allow a pre-pay option with inclusive resources, but any resources used outside the agreement are billable, sometimes at a premium, unlike SHARP™.
SHARP™ Management
Should a SHARP™ customer approach their network’s capacity, they are alerted automatically and can simply adjust their SHARP™ infrastructure usage by managing demand on the network; adding more processor speed, memory or storage space; or simply managing a period of sub-prime performance.
“SHARP™ users can prioritise resources to certain VMs within their cloud. VMs compete for the available resources, but reservations can be set for priority machines. So if a SHARP customer has a database server and a file server within their cloud, the user can prioritise the resources for the database server to maximise its performance,” Said Karl Robinson, Managing Director at StratoGen.
In a real world example, one StratoGen customer required nine VMs - two Database Servers, both with a 2.27GHz processor, 8GB memory and 250GB storage space, one Utility Server, with a 2.27GHz processor, 4GB memory and 250GB storage space, and six Web Servers, each with a 2.27GHz processor, 2GB memory and 100GB storage. On a per VM basis this would have cost more than £1,800 per month.
Switching to SHARP™ enabled the customer to configure 10 VMs within a resource pool of 12 GHz of processing power, 26GB of RAM and 500 GB storage space at a price of £1,100 per month. No performance was sacrificed and the customer saved more than 40 per cent per month.
Mr Robinson said: “Many customers don’t like the surprise bills that come with metered hosting, and realise that they are not using all the resource that they are paying for on per-VM billing models. They want a fixed price plan that enables them to pay upfront for their usage. Just like people know how many minutes and texts they have on their mobile phone contract, now SHARP™ customers know how much processor power, memory and storage space their private cloud has available. Their operational cost is fixed. We sell clients a fixed amount of resource on our platform, just as if they were managing their own datacentre. They can then build their own VMs within the resource that we allocate, but will never be hit with any unexpected costs.”
About StratoGen
StratoGen is a managed hosting company providing enterprise VMware hosting, managed server hosting, colocation and connectivity products all backed by a 100% uptime SLA.
StratoGen have invested significant capital into building out a true enterprise class infrastructure that offers clients real business benefits whilst reducing their costs. High uptime, high throughput websites and online applications require resilient & scalable hosting solutions and this is where StratoGen is a market leader.
