Webair has announced that the anticipated Cloud Services are now available. What are Cloud Services, you may well ask? Webair has released this information in their newsletter, providing a breakdown of what they have to offer.

Webair Cloud Storage – Your dedicated server or load balanced clusters can use cloud storage in place of local hard drive storage, content servers, or NAS/SAN device. Your content will be stored on a cloud of 100+ storage devices in the same datacenter as your server (or in multiple datacenters if you have a geo-LB setup).

Advantages being:

1) Endless storage – you never have to worry about adding more disk drives, having to take servers down for storage upgrades, etc. The cloud will look like its 100+TB to your machine.

2) Drive failures – never have to be down again because a critical drive that holds your content has failed or have to wait for backups to be restored, etc.

3) Additional redundancy – if a drive fails in one of our storage servers, or even if a group of the servers fail there is no outage for you. In fact you wouldn’t even notice any issue. We take care of all of this on the backend. If you have a single content server or NAS/SAN today, you have a single point of failure. Our cloud totally eliminates that and the need to pay for a redundant box that does nothing until the primary fails. Your server/cluster will have 2 redundant connections to the cloud which are either gigabit or 10gigabit.

4) Speed – you’re only going to get so much speed out of 1 drive in your server, or even a raid5 with 5-10 drive, its pure physics based on the spindle speed of the drives. With our cloud storage you benefit from having literally hundreds of spindles serving up your content. There is also a huge amount of cache which would be returning your content without even having to reach the spindles. Our clusters are currently pushing 30+Gbps of content and are expandable to 500+Gbps. This will increase the life and use you’ll get out of your server by not having to upgrade it prematurely because of i/o bottlenecks.

5) Backups – our cloud storage includes built in snapshots. By default we take daily snapshots and keep them for a week. You can access these snapshots directly via FTP or SSH, see exactly how ALL your content looked each day for the last 7 days and simply copy any files you need to your life file system. We also fully backup the clouds to secondary clusters as well. You can customize your snapshot frequency and retention yourself as well.

6) Cost – You only pay for what you use. Why buy a server with 2TB of storage because you think you may need it in 6 months or a year? You’ll be paying for all that extra storage for months! With our cloud storage you only pay for what you use and you can scale to unlimited storage without any growing pains.

Webair VPS is cloud based as well – Our VPS service is unlike others in respect to:

1) It sits on top of our Cloud Storage, so you benefit from all of the above features. Grow your VPS storage as needed and pay for only what you use.

2) Redundancy – your VPS will sit on top of a farm of MULTIPLE physical servers. The resources that are allocated to you (CPU/memory/disk) are guaranteed. You don’t have to worry about other VPSs consuming too many resources. We simply add more physical machines to our farms to increase resources and everything balances itself automatically on the backend. If a physical machine dies or multiple physical machines die, your VPS stays online.

3) Migration – Webair can take a ‘live image’ of any UNIX (bsd/linux) or Windows based server at any other host and turn it into a VPS server within a matter of hours. No software has to be reinstalled, no content copies, no reconfiguration. This is technology we built in house which is rock solid and has been used many times. You’ll login to the machine and everything will be exactly as it was on the physical machine. Our VPS can mimic either 32bit or 64bit operating systems so no binary files need to be recompiled.

This means a Webair VPS has no single point of failure, which makes it much more redundant than any single dedicated server. You can also upgrade resources instantly (CPU/memory) without having to take anything down. From a management standpoint it all works as if it was the same as a physical server, you can see MRTG graphs for your port usage, hard reboot the server from our control panel if it becomes unresponsive, etc.

Our newest offering is a cloud computing product which sits on top of our cloud storage and our VPS products. It provides for aggregate on-demand resources utilization allowing you to scale your CPU needs as needed. As mentioned in some other posts, this is where it can start to get technical and where the client needs to put some work into using it properly.

HOWEVER, all that said our Cloud Storage offering is a simple drop in replacement for your local storage. ANYONE can use it without having to be technical or even make any changes to scripts/programs/ftp/etc. The same goes for our VPS product, it looks and feels like any other dedicated server, it just happens to have a more redundancy.

Check out the Webair website if you would like more info regarding these products. Please note that our cloud storage can even be used for servers at other hosts for offsite backups, snapshots, or even to simply have a warm copy of your data sitting ready to go live should your server ever crash as part of a disaster recovery plan.