October 27, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web hosting and hosted email provider Simply Mail Solutions (SMS - http://www.simplymailsolutions.com/) has adopted Virtualization Software Technology for its hosted server applications, it was announced recently. The UK company has implemented Infrastructure 3 from VMware, Inc., and the move is intended to aid its growing email and web hosting activity.
“To some companies virtualization is just about running more servers on a given piece of hardware,” explained SMS Managing Director, Mr. Colin Smith. “For us it was about maintaining levels of customer service without the number of individual items of hardware getting out of hand and becoming unmanageable”
“The ability to leverage our enterprise class centralized NetApp storage means that the virtual machines are available to any of the hosts in a cluster,” added SMS’ Technical Director, Mr. Keith Pritchard. “This gives us the ability to seamlessly move a service between servers with zero downtime in the case of a hardware problem for example. The high availability platform constantly monitors itself and all services for any sign of a problem and can take immediate action. Of course, services can be moved manually across the cluster for maintenance meaning no downtime to upgrade memory or replace a card. The solution takes considerably less power than older solutions and is a key component of SMS’ ongoing commitment to a more environmentally friendly data center. This came at a good time for us and saved us buying a large number of individual servers. The existing servers will be redeployed for services such as DNS.”
SMS is based in Warrington in the United Kingdom and caters to customers all over the world.
