TPP Internet
“The flaw is that the market isn’t used to a consumption model.” Sam Higgins, Longhaus
Domain name registrar TPP Internet has been testing Bulletproof’s VM hosting service with a view to reducing costs by cutting the number of physical servers it needs. Managing director Peter Shilling explains that the company currently operates a dozen Linux-based Dell servers in pairs to provide redundancy. In most cases the workload is well within the capacity of a modern server—running a DNS (domain name service) “barely touches the sides” of an entry-level box, he says—but consolidating multiple services into a single environment can reduce reliability and increase recovery time in the event of a problem.
TPP’s existing servers are located in Bulletproof’s data centre and several of them link to systems operated by the various registries. These functions can be transferred to a virtual machine fairly simply, according to Shilling.
The company—which has a long-term relationship with Bulletproof for server management and maintenance—responded to an invitation to trial VM hosting. So far TPP has tested two applications: a DNS server and its own Java-based registrar program running against the .au test registry. The next step is to pilot the virtual machines in production conditions. The existing practice of running multiple systems with load sharing makes that relatively easy to do. A VM can take over the work of a physical server and if anything does go awry the latter can be quickly brought back online.
Shilling expects to keep the “grunt work”—servers with the heaviest workloads such as the databases—on physical CPUs for some time. He doesn’t rule out virtualising them but only after some very serious and successful testing. “Our production [database] systems get a beating,” he says, but the other tasks are neither CPU nor disk intensive so he expects the performance of the virtual machines will be comparable to that of the physical servers.
Even Modesto admits some applications—notably databases carrying a heavy load—are more suited to dedicated servers but points out that there’s nothing stopping a client from teaming VM web or application servers with a dedicated database server. Silling agrees. “We don’t have to worry about hardware failing [in a virtualised environment],” Shilling says.
The Sun servers used by Bulletproof have internal redundancy, according to Modesto, but if a hardware problem occurs VMware will detect it and move the affected VMs to other processors until the defective parts have been replaced.
TPP has had a few disk failures in recent months leading to its technicians being called out in the middle of the night. Modesto explains that Bulletproof’s storage is also virtualised and is delivered to the VMs from Sun storage devices over a SAN (storage area network). “[Customers] get the benefits of enterprise-grade storage on small installations,” he says, including daily backups to SATA drives for disaster recovery purposes along with disk-to-disk-to-tape archiving.
For Shilling the main attraction is lots of redundancy. For example, a service could be spread across three or four virtual machines instead of two physical servers “without having to fork out for $10,000 servers”. He expects to halve the number of physical servers used by TPP, which will cut his costs by between $25,000 and $30,000 per year, after reduced rack space and lease payments are offset by the VM hosting charges. “For us it’s about redundancy and reducing the number of physical machines.”
If TPP does decide to switch Shilling says it’ll be a process of moving over six months or so. He doesn’t want to push ahead too quickly, but says: “I truly believe in the technology.”
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