As reported in an article published in the pages of the New York Times, research experts conducted an experiment in which it was planned to find out whether wireless devices can be used for communications between dedicated servers, data center in the future or not.

The researchers set out to find out whether the use of wireless systems will speed traffic between servers, data center , if the basic (cable) system is overloaded in the near future. Several server racks in one of the centers were equipped with small corporations directional antennas for wireless devices and switching, which were installed on top of the server racks.

Used for communications range of ultrashort radio waves: The frequency – 60 GHz, the wavelength – about 5 millimeters. According to the researcher, the detailed system of wireless communications has allowed to significantly accelerate the speed of communication between the racks – from 45% to 95% depending on the specific experimental conditions.

It is known that wireless communications are often not completely reliable. Communication may be interrupted, for example, by the inclusion of a microwave oven or by unfavorable conditions for admission to a particular point. So it is the fact that this idea will be accepted by most operators or the data centers. Nevertheless, the situation in case of data centers is radically different from the usual situation with unreliable mobile phones with unstable connections to Wi-Fi.

The fact is that, the entire situation within the data center is under strict control, all occurring processes are well predicted, and the equipment is serviced by staff for uninterrupted services.  In addition, this system uses directional antennas, ie relationship between the switching devices is carried out through the narrow beams of radio waves.

It is undisputed that Cloud is spreading and has recently been the subject of writing the entrance exam, so it is natural that IT executives and business persons want the answer for their questions and alleviate their fears.

I will not address the issue of security. We’ve talked a lot about that here so I will focus on other questions that always arise in these discussions. The first question relates to costs.

Cloud Computing actually decreases IT costs?

To answer, we will analyze the differences between cloud and the traditional IT infrastructure. In the current model, the physical resources (dedicated server, storage, etc.) are owned or managed by the IT departments of companies. In general, usage levels are low and a significant portion of the computing capacity is idle. As a result, we have machines and data centers that are not fully used, with consequent high costs per unit of labor. In a virtualized environment, the physical resources are still owned by the company, they are virtualized in multiple logical resources, increasing the level of use and lowering unit labor costs.

Of course there is a difference between private clouds, where the company still owns the resources in “cloudification” and public clouds. A public cloud: its potential for large-scale works, in general, with unit costs far less than those devoted to a single company. A public cloud is the one that best exploits the economies of scale, achieving unit costs per unit of labor that is much lower than other alternatives.

But the result is that, in general, the model of cloud, private or public, tends to offer lower costs than the traditional model.

Another interesting point is a question that arises now and then: “private cloud can be considered as a true cloud?”. One company, to build a private cloud computing needs to invest in assets and software that comprise the intelligence of the cloud layer, which are components that can implement virtualization, standardization and automation. It is also a finite cloud because its limits are the capacity of your data center. It also reduces the fear of entering the cloud, because it operates under the policies and security controls of the company.

Another issue is where to start? There are no ready answers, but to any initiative, cloud is a prerequisite to obtain executive support and budget allocated. After selecting a design proof-of-concept or even an actual implementation. Often a POC can cost as much as a real project, and why not start showing what benefits a cloud can generate with a real project?

The result of a pilot project for successful cloud is evidence of the popular saying “see-to-believe.” It’s amazing to see how a skeptical executive is keen to see it on a portal application and allocation of computing resources in minutes rather than several days in which it is accustomed. One suggestion is the development and testing environment. Often about 50% of IT efforts are spent on these activities. Do not forget that there is a whole process of migration to the cloud, which requires extra effort to maintain interoperability between systems in the cloud environment (public and / or private) and the system is still on-premise. The change is gradual and this coexistence can last for many years.

Another doubt that arises is that, changes must happen in IT to support cloud or not. Cloud is not just a technology, it is a new computational model that changes the rules of IT use, affecting both service providers and IT products as their customers. Therefore it is clear that many processes will be affected, since the producer-consumer relationship (new business models and contracts) to the models and processes of governance is are established in the IT field. So it is absolutely essential to get a skilled cloud.

At the end, cloud is already there. IT departments cannot ignore this trend and should lead the process. The cloud model allows the proliferation of “shadow IT”, these initiatives are triggered by the users without IT involvement. The uncontrolled spread of invisible IT can cause future problems in terms of safety and interoperability. Thus, IT can and should take advantage of the cloud model to be an important actor and transform the IT organization.

When talking about VMware virtualization,  a few years ago nobody thought about how this technology would become complex: today’s large companies and SMEs have sufficiently large virtualized environments for better security.

Today, virtualization has become a key enabler to the IT and business for companies. In the initial stage, it was primarily used to consolidate web hosting servers and IT resources to save cost and space, and reduce energy consumption. Since then, this technology has found many more possibilities of use and new applications. Companies exploit it as a way to enhance business continuity, to maximize operational flexibility, provisioning, testing, changes in management or to support disaster recovery services.

At the server level, virtualization separate (separates) the physical resources of the operating system (OS) and applications. It breaks the rigid link between hardware and software, and allows multiple instances of an operating system and various software applications to run on the same hardware support. In other words, virtualization extracts and organizes the operating system and applications software in a virtual machine (VM). The entire “package” of virtual hardware – CPU, memory and network, OS and applications – becomes a single software files (file). The machines are hardware independent and can be managed as documents, with the convenience of copying and pasting.

The VM monitor, or hypervisor provides access to physical resources to multiple virtual machines or guests. Hardware resources are dynamically allocated to groups for workloads, while the VMs are isolated (they do not influence each other) and encapsulated (easy to store, move, etc.). This allows you to create a series of savings, thanks to less use of hardware, electricity and space systems and infrastructures. At the same time, it reduces costs related to personnel, as well as the complexity, implementation time and management.

One way to understand the impact of virtualization on the IT industry is to compare it to the Electronic Banking : once the money is deposited in the physical system and converted into bytes, it increases the speed of business. The money can be moved in all parts of the world at very high speeds. Transforming physical feature information (bytes), virtualization brings a new level of efficiency and flexibility in IT. In particular, virtualization makes it possible for faster and more flexible provisioning and managing of the entire IT infrastructure.

Have you ever thought that in addition to keywords, links and Google, the work of SEO can also be affected by servers and hosts that you choose for your website?

Let’s see how it works.

At first, web servers and hosts are not a concern, but they can cause real problems and deserve attention. There are some problems that can affect a site’s ranking in search engines:

Server Hosting Timeouts: If a search engine is passing requests to a page and this request is not met because of server timeout, certainly the SERPs do not go to the page ( search results pages) and will have a bad ranking, because no content was found.

Speed ??: Not as bad as the server timeouts, but it is a problem. As mentioned, the crawlers do not have patience, if a page takes to load, it gives up. But this is a major problem for users, who will not wait forever to load a page and go away.

Shared IP Address: Here is a somewhat controversial point, but some SEOs believe that this is a problem. The point is that if your site is the neighborhood spammer or low quality, it could lower the confidence and credibility of your site. Also, direct links to let users IP lost.

IP blocked: The processing of web pages, the crawlers can block a specific IP address or address range instead of blocking a site specifically. MSN / Live you can check which sites share the same IP doing the search: “IP: a-ip-address”.

Recognition of bots: To protect the contents of the site, you can restrict the number of requests to a page within a certain time. Care is needed when determining this site.

Bandwidth / Transfer Limit: Many servers limit the amount of transfer that a site can have. This may eventually take down a site if any content becomes very popular and the site receives many visitors. With the site down, no people, no crawlers will be able to access the site.

Geo-server: This is not a problem, but a recommendation of good practice. The search engines use, too, the server location – location of the site , so – to determine the relevance of a response to a search, considering the factor of local search. As the local search ends up being the goal of many sites, or offer products / services to a region or country, it is recommended to host the site in the country where the targeted visitors are.

So as not to have your work SEO hindered by issues far more than off-page external links, it is worth choosing the server of your site carefully.

Until a few years ago, the Linux and Windows server hosting services were radically different. Today’s systems platform compatibility of the companies hosting these differences will reduce dramatically.

The way to access the server is one of the main differences between the two types of services. Both allow access via FTP, a protocol for transferring files, but only offers Linux hosting access, a system that allows for remote access to a server. Both allow you to exchange files with the second offers advanced controls and access to critical areas of the server.

The standard of Linux-based systems are designed and developed according to the needs of programmers and technicians. These are applications that can later provide functionality to the end customer, developing and improving systems based on Linux. On the other hand, Windows systems are already designed taking the customer into consideration.

Another major difference between the platforms are supported programming languages. PHP, Perl and CGI are associated with Linux Hosting as ASP,. NET or ColdFusion are supported by the Windows platform. The same goes for the databases to Linux being “preferred” using MySQL privileges as the Windows Hosting MS Access or SQL Server. All these factors influence the development of applications or websites for each of the platforms.

On security issues, it is widespread that the Windows platform has more holes than its rival Linux. Although the concept is not totally false, because it is free and open to the large community of programmers, can correct and update any security flaws more quickly. For Windows, only these gaps are bridged with the publication of “patches to” or “service packs” which does not occur so quickly. In any case both rentals can be operated and maintained safely if carried out by qualified personnel.

Ultimately the key is to passing the the content and information to the website. It is the customer and / or programmer who decide which platform best serves their interests while taking the features and services into account that customers request.

For several days I was thinking to write a post about the differences between ASP and Saas and yesterday I decided to do because of an email I received from one of the readers of this humble blog. In the mail, there was a series of questions using the acronym asp and other using the acronym SaaS, and I was unable to identify whether it was a matter of right or use of the acronym that were really confusing.

If you seek information from the term ASP and Saas and even if “differences between ASP and Saas” many entries appear that attempt to explain the terms but most of the comparisons confuse the term ASP hosting and from there the comparison does not fit with Saas. I would like to clarify first “what is ASP and What is Hosting?” based on these definitions:

ASP is a paid platform. Within its single fee it include licensing, dedicated hosting, maintenance, etc.

In regime, Hosting pay licenses and / or project and servers can host it on your property or perhaps the provider.

I think it is clear that pay-per-use ASP Hosting and pay licenses to use products and machines can be yours or rented but are in provider’s premises. Clarifying these concepts, I will try to clarify the differences between ASP and SaaS.

ASP stands for Application Service Provider and the Wikipedia explains in its first paragraph that it provides software services.

Among the factors that characterize a PSA highlights the widespread use of Internet , the ability to accelerate the deployment and implementation of applications and portability of services and operations to third parties. The main barrier to a PSA lies in convincing their customers that their information with a third remains secure. On the other hand, own and operate the software and hardware environment and rented to customers to use computer applications.

Let us now turn to the definition that makes SaaS wiki:

“Software as a Service (SaaS) is a distribution model of software where the IT company provides maintenance, daily operations, and support software used by the client. In other words, it is to have the information, processing, inputs and outcomes of the business logic of the software. In simple words: The customer has the system hosted in the IT company. It is software accessed via Internet . It is not necessarily to operate through Web browsers, business logic resides in the central city of provider.

And the truth is written in different words but there are very few differences:

• Accessed via the Internet.
• In a service operation and maintenance.
• You pay per use, not license.
• The data and business logic in provider’s premises.

Applications will not necessarily be delivered through web browsers and therefore at times be necessary to install software on the client and not others.

And then ” What are the differences between ASP and SaaS?”. For a though, it does not seem if there are differences:

ASP is a proprietary software from other ISVs . In the SaaS model there are those ISVs (software developers) that offer hosting and software in one package.

Many of the applications running in the ASP are not prepared to provide access via the Internet. I’ve seen agreements of HP, SAP, etc. with ASP to offer internet through the same applications that were designed to run in-house.

These same applications were not designed to serve multiple clients from different companies, moreover, is running an instance for each client of the ASP. Most applications as a service (SaaS) are designed to deliver the application to multiple clients through a single instance (multitenancy).

Relating to the above, to provide coverage instance to several clients at once it is necessary that the application has a high level customization for each client.

Although we have seen that not necessarily the applications offered as a service (SaaS) are consumed through a browser and therefore do not require installation on the client, in fact most of them are consumed by the browser. In fact I know that Saas is not the case. The applications running on ASP may or may not run through the browser and therefore require additional installation on the client (a Windows emulator or unix, remote desktop, terminal server , citrix).

Related to the above, ASP can offer different applications and different types depending on the agreements reached with the companies that own software. This however is more complicated to get into the SaaS model, normally ISV offers a single software but we also have example like google apps.

Finally, something more than evident is that SaaS can enjoy direct support, more personalized, and without intermediaries who can pass the buck to a software problem.

I hope the post has been cleared to add more questions and that in any case in controversy, sufficient to get us to clarify the terms.

When we purchase a product or service that requires a significant investment, it is essential to know in depth the characteristics or properties, if you have a product, and the advantages and security provided if a service.

When it comes to data center, there are multiple factors to consider:

First large data storage capacity. Not only that, but good exchange rate for the same. If we shut down  the server, but far from databases, the set speed will suffer.

The physical data center runs on electricity. It should have assured electricity even in disaster conditions (cuts supply network, fires, floods, etc.). It should not just have a efficient UPS but also the authentic electric generators to ensure supply.

Backups of course. The data is stored redundantly and must be accessible in a transparent manner if a database or server goes down.

The redundancy is applicable not only to the above, but for all the physical devices involved in the management and transmission of data.

Very important: We not only have to think about security and communications software , we must also think about good physical security for all equipment and wiring.

A data center that does not have a professional team, or have 24/7 support, the proper operation of the service is not very reliable. The provider should maintain and update the software (this task must be fully supported by this team). The provider must be available to customers to solve any problems that arise.

Increasingly, data centers are concerned to comply with the recommendations within the scope of  “Green IT” and this will benefit customers to lower energy costs through efficiency.

Finally, ensure the financial solvency of the company that provides service and … before you sign the contract rather read the Terms of Service and the fine print.

How to get all this information is easy to imagine. Almost always, gather this data from the service provider.