What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is probably best understood as pooling resources from multiple hardware sources together to create a highly available environment for virtual machines to run independent of the underlying architecture. This means that if a failure happens with part of the cloud another part can take over and continue to run the virtual machines without interruption.
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is the act of separating the operating system and software on a computer system from the hardware by adding an additional layer in between. This extra layer creates a virtual environment that emulates generic hardware for the upper layers and allows multiple virtual environments to exist on a single physical server.
What is Os Virtualization?
OS Virtualization the technique of adding the virtualization layer on top of the operating system which allows multiple “jailed” instances in which users can run programs independent of each other instance. This version of virtualization has many drawbacks and limitations because you cannot move the instances to another server and it has to use the same operating system as the underlying physical server. This is not the technique that Colosseum Online employs for its virtualization
What is Cloud Storage?
Similar to cloud computing this is the technique of pooling together storage devices so that if there is a failure on one the data can be transferred to another in the pool without interruption of service.
What is SAN Storage?
Storage Area Network devices are devices that sit on the backend of a network to provide storage in a cloud environment. They are designed to be highly redundant and fault tolerant to provide a stable and secure storage for virtual servers.
What are Application Templates?
Templates are pre-configured bundles of software that easily allow you to create new virtual machines on our cloud. There are two types of templates available from our control panel, you can access templates from our library which include an operating system with patches/updates/service packs already installed and pre-configured with various software for web servers, DNS and other commonly used applications. You can also create your own templates from a pre-existing backup of one of your own virtual servers, this means you can create a new VM using a template from the library, customize it for your own needs, create a backup of it and then convert the backup into a new template. The templates allow you to easily create new VMs in minutes that are ready to go into production right away.
What is a host?
A host is a physical server within a cloud infrastructure. A host does not contain any customer data and is only utilised for its CPU and RAM.
What is self-healing architecture?
Self-healing architecture is when a host or SAN storage array fails there are additional hosts and SANs that quickly and automatically take the load ensuring continued, uninterrupted service.
What is Fail over?
Fail over is when a host fails there is another one in place to immediately take the load and continue serving your web pages or applications without any service interruption.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
