Company slices cost and raises speed of server deployment with virtual server farms.

Hostway, a web hosting provider, today launched its dedicated virtualised server range. It states that the new virtualised server portfolio enables companies which could not previously afford virtualisation to take advantage of it by using a hosted solution. It says that the new offering also expands their existing dedicated server range by increasing the reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness of customer hosting arrangements.

It explains that it can now have new web, database or application servers up and running in around thirty minutes, rather than the several days required to build and configure a standard dedicated server. This helps companies to rapidly scale up their infrastructure as needed and enables a pay-per-resource approach, adds the company.

It claims that their virtualised dedicated servers are also more robust than standard dedicated servers because resources can be split over a resource pool including several different physical servers. This means that companies are no longer reliant on the performance of a single server box, ensuring business continuity in the event of one physical server failing.

"Many companies are keen to use virtualisation because it can help them cut costs, increase server utilisation and make their infrastructure more robust and reliable, but simply don't have the expertise or the resources to set up a virtualised server environment in-house," said David Foxley, enterprise technology manager, Hostway UK. "The licenses for ESX server can cost thousands of pounds alone, add to that the costs of implementing the technology and training staff to manage it and you could find that the cost of adopting virtualisation cannot be justified by the benefits it brings. Using our new hosted virtualised servers, companies can benefit from virtualisation without having to train and certify IT staff, or make large upfront investments."

"Very often, businesses are forced to buy entire dedicated servers when they simply don't need all the resources that the server offers," continued Foxley. "By using virtualisation, companies can purchase as many or as few resources as they need and run multiple web, application, database or email servers. This pay-per-resource approach is much more cost-effective than purchasing entire new servers every time you add another business critical application. Furthermore, many companies are intimidated by using virtualisation platforms such as ESX because of the time and expense associated with training in-house IT staff, but by choosing hosted virtualisation, all of the maintenance and setup is outsourced to a team of VMWare-certified experts. By offering customers a more cost-effective, flexible and scalable solution, we can solve some of the traditional pain-points that companies have been experiencing with web hosting for years."