Inside ASI-AP

We have invested over a hundred thousand dollars since the start of the year in our new hosting servers in Melbourne. Similar projects have also been undertaken in the US, Canada and UK hosting centres - the total spend worldwide is now just under $800,000. We have moved to a virtualised environment where we can manage a hundred or more customers on a single server cluster, instead of having to manage over a hundred individual servers. We are using VMWare ESX Server, which is the server infrastructure product of the same VMWare we have been using on our desktops for iMIS demos for a couple of years now. ESX actually runs Linux as it's core operating system, and on top of that it can run hundreds of Windows Servers, all virtualised.

Our initial configuration includes 2 servers (8 CPUs in each server for a total of 16 CPUs) and a fibre optic SAN (storage area network) for disk shared between both servers. Dell now sells these pre-installed with ESX they are becoming so popular - see link to the Dell website. We can add capacity for processing simply by adding extra servers (ie. CPUs) and disk space simply by adding hard disk drives to the SAN.

VMWare ESX is impressive software and becoming more widely used in our larger customers. It simplifies management of servers and provides for automatic load balancing and disaster recovery. It also reduces the number of physical servers you need to manage and saves power.

For our hosting customers, the most significant advantage is they will be getting their own "virtual" servers instead of having to be on shared servers which was the case in our old infrastructure - for the same price. The correct name for what they will get is a "virtual dedicated" server - a dedicated server but deployed in a virtualised hosting environment. The typical setup will be virtual dedicated servers for the iMIS .net application server, .net web server and the iMIS terminal server (replaces Citrix), and a shared SQL Server. Both production and test environments will be available, and since they are all virtualised it will be easy to run different iMIS versions at the same time.

The ability to clone servers in the ESX environment will help customers build replicated environments for testing or to complete upgrades quickly. And no need to purchase any new server hardware, since the servers are virtual!

New customers signed up in the last month or two will be deployed on the new ESX infrastructure. Existing customers will be moved to virtual dedicated servers and onto the new setups either as they upgrade to iMIS 15 or by direct consultation on a case-by-case basis over the coming 6+ months.