Archive for the ‘the cloud’ tag
A Beginner’s Guide to Choosing the Right Web Hosting Solution no comments
Businesses are converting their IT infrastructure into the cloud every day – phone systems, virtual desktops, and office servers. But when your business makes that transition to The Cloud why do you need so many options that look similar but have different names like “Cloud Hosting” or “Virtual Servers”? Which type is best for you– and what’s in between?
The Cloud
“The Cloud” is one of the most popular terms on today’s internet but lacks an agreed-upon universal definition. The cloud offers scalability and reliability at a low cost; it can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection via various technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls or video conferencing applications which use WebRTC.
Virtual Servers
Virtual servers are an efficient and cost-effective way to provide your company with the necessary computing resources. A single high-capacity server in a data center can host 10 or more virtual private servers, such that each client has privacy protections while still sharing certain amenities like customizable operating systems and software applications across all accounts on a said device–this model provides greater manageability as well!
Dedicated Servers
When you need the most power for your application, there’s no better way than with a dedicated server. This one-of-” kind” service offers all its benefits and more – like increased privacy (you won’t be sharing resources), and custom software designed just for YOU! With less traffic on an idle system thanks to low electricity consumption at night when systems aren’t being used; it will ultimately save money over time due in part to not having as many employees utilize expensive licenses across 3 regions each needing their copy–the savings add up fast
Cloud Hosting
Cloud Hosting can mean just about any type of hosted solution in a secure data center. The more advanced Cloud Hosted solutions providers are offering a robust scalable network of servers that can provide redundancy and scalability that otherwise is not present in a single virtual server or dedicated server. You must be careful when you shop for vendors who use the term “Cloud Hosting” to promote using the Cloud to host your application or server. What you generally want is a cloud hosting solution that offers you a ‘virtual machine’ in the cloud provider’s network, that offers some level of scalability, and redundancy.
TurnKey’s offering
TurnKey Cloud offers a full virtual machine on top of multiple redundant clusters of servers which provides the cloud benefits of scalability and redundancy to let you install any operating system and any applications without having to utilize software developers to convert their applications to a proprietary cloud platform. If it runs on the server in your office, it will run in the TurnKey Cloud platform.
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Earth Day and Your Data Center – Green is Not What It Used To Be no comments
As we celebrate Earth Day, many businesses, organizations and individuals will take additional time to reflect on their impact on our environment and the contributions we can all make to a sustainable future. Organizations like EarthDay.org help spearhead awareness and direct-action options we can all consider in our own lives to be ‘greener’.
The term “Green”, “Being Green” or “Going Green” all have multiple variations and meanings, but in general, we all accept that it means to help sustain the environment in some fashion. Many years ago, the Earth Day movement started more with a focus about recycling. Today, it has evolved into an awareness of sustainability by reducing overall carbon footprints through less consumption (and output of non-renewable resources to produce the goods and/or power we consume).
One of the largest non-green impacting areas we see is electronic devices like our mobile devices, computers, and servers. While desktop computers at least have power saving modes that often can reduce their usage, they still consume (and impact the environment) roughly the same as 4,500 miles driven per year of a typical US car. Servers are the worst offenders of the bunch, running 24/7, consuming large amounts of energy to keep your email, files, apps, and websites running all the time even when we are asleep.
Those high energy consuming servers, and in some cases office desktop PC’s, can all be moved to the cloud through cloud-based servers and colocation. It may not seem obvious, but moving your servers and desktop PCs into the cloud can make a huge impact. While data centers can consume massive amounts of energy to keep those cloud-based servers running 24 hours a day (especially the massive industrial air conditioning and redundant power systems in place to support these facilities), the fact is that data centers can be scaled up to effectively utilize the best-in-class options to be efficient and sourced from green energy, to substantially reduce, or in fact eliminate their entire carbon footprint. If you colocate or host your servers in such a data center, you effectively reduce your impact on our environment significantly.
TurnKey Internet’s Green Data Center was built to have an effective carbon footprint of zero – sourcing all its power from a massive on-site solar array and hydro-electric power provided by New York State’s Recharge NY program, on top of the most cutting-edge power efficiency and data center cooling technology. TurnKey Internet’s state-of-the-art data center won the New York State Environmental Excellence award and The U.S. Federal Government’s Environmental Protection Agency awarded the facility the 2nd only New York Energy Star Certified Data Center designation.
So from our stand point, green is about minimizing or having zero impact on the environment – and more so, we are helping businesses take their office servers, computers, and other IT infrastructure into the cloud to minimize their carbon footprints too. This Earth Day, take a look around your home or office – and see what small changes you can do to help improve your impact on the world. Follow Us :
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Moving Your Business to The Cloud – Which Solution is Best? no comments
Businesses are moving their IT infrastructure to the Cloud every day – phone systems, virtual desktops, office servers, and lots more. But when your business is making that transition to The Cloud, why are there there so many options that look the same but with different names like “Cloud Servers”, “Virtual Servers”, “Dedicated Servers”? Which is the best solution for your business – and what is the difference?
First, lets define “The Cloud.” The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost-effective way of accessing information technology at any time from anywhere. The technology of the cloud revolves around the benefits of moving expensive and complicated IT out of your office into an efficient, scalable, and secure data center. So if you are looking to move your office server into “The Cloud”, you are essentially looking to host the office server in a datacenter, and use the Internet to connect to it from any where, any time.
Virtual Servers
A Virtual Server (also called a Virtual Private Server, or VPS) is the term used for the server and software that runs on the same physical server as other virtual servers and is functionally equivalent to a separate physical computer dedicated to the individual customer’s needs. A single high capacity server in a datacenter can host 10 or more Virtual Private Servers – such that each client has their own privacy, computer resources, customizable operating system and software. The virtual server model is a more power and cost efficient method and provides an easier to manage and generally more reliable computer server infrastructure than say hosting the same application on a typical server in your office.
A VPS will be your lowest cost – easiest to use, option in most cases. If you need a lot of computing power, or resources (disk, network bandwidth, etc) – your costs can go double or more very quickly. The down side is your VPS resides on a ‘shared’ resource (that dedicated server that is split up between 10 or more other VPS clients). So there can be times when you have trouble getting all the performance you may need, and scalability is limited (you may be able to increase ram or bandwidth double or more from your initial machine, but costs shoot up quickly as you do so). But the VPS is easy to manage, you don’t have to worry about hardware generally since the server that your VPS is housed on will typically be a very high end server with built in redundancy. But it is still a single point of failure, which can have several hours of down time should your provider have to do maintenance.
Dedicated Servers
A dedicated server has all the same benefits of the Virtual Server for privacy, and custom software, but costs more since you have all the resources dedicated to just you (even when the system is idle, its using up electricity, so your costs and efficiency aren’t as optimal compared to a virtual server). But the dedicated server does offer a high level of performance, and for a busy application (say a phone system that connects 500 employees across 3 regions of the country) you will find the dedicated server is your best value when you need the maximum level of computing power.
A dedicated server will actually be your best performer, and best value if you have a highly demanding application that needs a lot of computing power. You can have access to 24 or more CPU processing cores, and 256GB+ of RAM if your budget allows – and it’s a lot cheaper than getting the same computing power versus a Cloud based Server. The downside is the single point of failure, and additional administrative efforts needed to maintain a dedicated server. Make sure you selected a dedicated server from your provider that includes management, backups, and guaranteed response times if something goes wrong.
Cloud Servers
A Cloud Server (Cloud hosted solution) – is going to give you best of all worlds – but at a price. You get the simplicity of a virtual machine to administer it. You get the ability to scale to very high capacity (even speeds faster than your average dedicated server), and you can even replicate to multiple servers and utilize load balancing for literally infinite scalability. The built in redundancy offers protection from single point of failure on hardware (since a cloud based server if the hardware fails, should auto restart on another node within a few seconds, picking up right where it left off) – but all this does come at a higher price. Typically 2x to 4x the cost of a traditional VPS, and if you need a lot of computer power, disk space, or bandwidth you really are going to pay a lot more for the privilege to have that level of redundancy and ability to scale on demand
So what works best for your business? Give us a call an we will help you choose the best one. At the end of the day, all 3 get you ‘in the cloud’. Follow Us :
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Earth Day Means Thinking about the Earth and being Green Every Day no comments
Howdie do Turnkey lovers,
Do you ladies and gentleman know what Tuesday, April 22nd 2014 is all about? Don’t worry, you don’t have to pull out your almanac or open Google to find what’s so special about, Tuesday, April 22nd 2014. The day was EARTH DAYYYYY!!!! Ok, you may not be as excited as I am about Earth day, but it’s a day that is lauded as the day for the environment. This could be going out to help with cleaning up an old playground or maybe picking up trash on the side of the road. Literally, anything that is good for the environment is appreciated on this day. Hey, you may even find your garbage man may have a little bit of pep to his or her step.
Ok, ok that may be a bit overboard about the garbage man, but it is a day where support for environmental protection is at an all time high. Now, you may be saying, “This is a webhosting company, why do they care about Earth Day?” Well my friend, almost every day at Turnkey Internet is some form of Earth day. How? How can everyday at Turnkey Internet be a version of Earth day? Well to answer that question, I must first ask a question back to you
- Do you have electricity in your home/workplace that you used to view this post ?
Those are pretty straightforward questions, right? They may even seem redundant as since you’re reading this post, you should have some form of electricity powering the machine you’re viewing this post on and more than likely, that machine is a desktop or laptop. You may be saying, “Yea, so what? What does this have to do with EarthDay and Turnkey Internet?”
That form of electricity is more than likely from a fossil fuel. What exactly is a fossil fuel? A fossil fuel is a fuel that is formed by natural processes such as coal. Using these type of fuels can lead to all sort of environmental issues such as Greenhouse gases being released into the environment. These gases can result in harmful effects to the environment and the people within it which results in a higher carbon footprint. You can read more about forms of electricity and fossil fuels here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel
The reason I’m even mentioning this is because technology has reached a point in time where different forms of electricity can be created. These different forms can be any of the following listed below and many others:
- Solar power – converting energy from the sun to electricity
- Hydroelectric Power – Converting energy from water to electricity
Now both of these forms of power conversion each have their pros and cons, but they also have one thing in common: a zero carbon footprint. What exactly is a zero carbon footprint? The Zero Carbon Footprint is the measure of the amount of green house gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The higher the footprint, the worse for the environment. How does this factor into Turnkey Internet? Well, we utilize both, solar power and hydroelectric power, within our datacenter.
On top of our building, we have many different solar panels that convert solar energy directly to electric power to power the datacenter, but not only that, we also receive power from Niagara Falls that directly power the datacenter as well.
That means that our datacenter currently has a zero-carbon footprint which is the most effective way to ensure you leave a good mark on the environment. Every day when I walk into work and look at our datacenter, it makes me proud to know that we’re not damaging the environment. That we are helping to sustain the environment by using outside of the box methods to power the AWESOME datacenter that is Turnkey Internet.
You can read more about our forms of power at:
http://turnkeyinternet.net/green-initiative/
Since it’s Earth Day, I wanted to bring light to the effectiveness on our power consumption at Turnkey Internet.
Until next time
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New New News! no comments
The expansion of our data center is official like a person with a whistle!
And, of course, We want to keep you all up-to-date and continue to share our photos with you. Why? Because you – ladies and gentleman – should be as excited as we are. Our techs are working hard getting everything up, our sales and marketing teams are rolling out great promotions, and everyday brings all new excitement. That’s right. There’s new promotions, people, pool tables and plants.
*Pool tables and plants you say, Dylan?*
Yes, pool tables and plants.
So what’s been going on here? Well, let us just show you.
First off, we want to welcome back Jared (otherwise known as, “Hey, intern!” or “More coffee, please.”) . You might recognize him. He interned here in the winter and has since graduated college! Jared is back finishing up his internship and we are glad to have him back in the Marketing Room.
Here we have Brian (Operations Manager) and Joe (Lead Technician). They have been hooking up a new pod in the DC and have been kicking butt. Keep up the work, boys!
And how do they stay sane during all those hours of work? Bumpin’ tunes!
Here is what the new pod looks like from the cloud! Or, well, from a ladder…
Before and after. Wires coming into the DC.
Some clamps and cords!
Our new plant, Leaf Ericson!
TurnKey mini pool table.
Last, but not least. We are giving away TurnKeychain Flashlights! If you want to win one, head to our Facebook page and like, comment or share the photo.
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