Virtualization: Really no one around
Quite unnoticed by the casual Internet user a silent revolution took place in the server centers around the globe.
I fondly remember that cold Christmas 2000 when our company delta consulting (later namics), a Web consultancy, moved to a new location. We had to move the server room, too. No easy undertaking. We had dedicated servers for a number of clients, our internal development and staging servers, filers, mail servers etc.
But we had a noble goal: finally some space again! Our old and crammed server room couldn’t hold more servers. Our new room seemed large and spacious. We continued to grow and soon we were once again mired in finding additional space.
Recently I returned to visit my former workplace just to find three quarters of the room converted into a meeting room.
How come?
How does Virtualization work? Companies like Parallels, VM Ware, Citrix and others provide software allowing to emulate or “virtualize” the hardware resources of a machine. The ubiquitous x86 type computer infrastructure was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments.
Sure you loose a bit of performance because the virtualization software mimics the actual physical hardware. With ever faster machines and ever more memory this is no roadblock to virtualization. There are however two big gains: Less space and less initial investment.
At Nektoon we have just a single server for the entire development platform. Roughly twenty or so virtual servers are running on top of it. Especially welcome for our startup: Instead of twenty servers we bought one. Albeit a bit more expensive, our initial investment was still a fraction of a normal setup. Nekton.com
Our live infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services. This has one key advantage: We do not need to invest time and money in setting up a live infrastructure but instead pay-as-we-go at Amazon. With the automation in place (see previous post) we have contained the sheer volume of repetitive setup tasks. Plus we let others solve these tasks.
The distributed infrastructure also allows you to get closer to your customers. In case of physical servers we would have chosen close-by server centers for purely practical reasons (Physical reboot of a machine). Yet somebody from the US will have quite longer response times when accessing servers at some place in Switzerland instead of someplace in the US itself. The distributed infrastructure of Amazon provides a neat framework for this case: Distributed storage and processing power across the globe. So we will store the notes of our American customers in America and vice-versa with notes in Europe.
Next to the technical benefits the impact on the business plan is remarkable: We can run a startup on a shoestring for quite some time.
Next in the series how to build a scalable startup: Testing.
