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The Virtual Evolution of Managed Services
By: Derrick Harris, Editor
GRIDtoday (March 24, 2008)
Bringing Virtualization to Canada's SMBs
Radiant Communications, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based provider of commercial broadband solutions, publicly entered the virtual space in October 2007 with its AlwaysThere hosted Exchange offering. Leveraging Radiant's Grid Computing Utility (GCU), a collection of virtual machines combined with a flexible storage area network (SAN), the hosted Exchange offering gives users a dedicated instance of Microsoft Exchange with, according to Radiant's director of advanced hosting, Jason Leeson, all the security and flexibility of an on-premise offering, as well as the economies of scale that come along with a shared environment. Thus far, the company has been focusing its marketing efforts around the Exchange service (specifically within the Canadian SMB market), and has been gaining a lot of traction as a result, but Leeson says that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Radiant also is offering virtual servers (running Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux or any VMware-compatible OS) to customers who want the ability to scale their resources as needed, on demand, without having to invest in purchasing and managing physical machines. Leeson said the concept of renting virtual servers on a pay-per-use basis is currently showing the most opportunity for uses such as disaster recovery (i.e., backup) and business continuity (i.e., automatic failover), but some customers are actually hosting their own applications on the grid. Radiant's grid computing environment is connected directly to its existing MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) core network, which Leeson says allows Radiant to host and deliver grid-based virtual servers and applications for each customer in a completely secure and private manner.
Concerning the latter, Leeson acknowledges that Radiant's virtual server model is still in its infancy, but points to significant advancements on the horizon. Currently, users wishing to cluster several VMs must wire the servers together themselves, as Radiant has not yet incorporated that level of automation. Additionally, customers must add servers directly through Radiant, with servers usually provisioned and ready to go in a few hours. However, Leeson explained, Radiant is only in the first stage of a three-phase rollout: (1) standardize the grid infrastructure; (2) build the internal management tools for automation and provisioning; and (3) delegate administration, control and management to users. Once the final phase is complete -- or at least underway -- Leeson says customers will have the full virtual private datacenter (VPDC) experience of being able to turn up or turn down servers on demand, track server utilization, etc. He thinks these customer-side management tools and consoles will be big differentiators as Radiant continues to grow its service.
Right now, the main target for virtual servers and VPDCs is the independent IT consultant market. “We talk to a lot of IT consultants, for example, who don't have their own datacenters [but] have niche vertical apps that they offer to their customer base,” said Leeson. “This is an opportunity for them to tap into the Radiant datacenter, and we set them up with the virtual servers and they can run what they want.” Professional service organizations, such as law firms, have been the main customers for the AlwaysThere hosted Exchange offering, added Leeson.
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