Virtual Data Center

There is no point in arguing about what datacenter, i.e. conventional or virtual one, is ‘better’. Both concepts have advantages of their own, so there are cases when each option is a better fit for a particular company.

On-premise (on-prem for short) data centers are companies with their own facilities located in a particular spot, where physical servers are placed along with other equipment. On-prem infrastructure may also be used for running private clouds, by means of virtualizing compute, memory, storage, and networking resources.

Both on-prem and virtual data centers are widely used to provide businesses with IT infrastructure to meet their requirements. The main considerations while choosing the model usually are the level of customization, security, compliance to standards, and, last but not least, the cost.

If your business requires a purpose-built system or customizable hardware, a tangible data center hosting is what you need. The same is when full control and complete data visibility are a must. Completely moving to the cloud, however suitable and cost-effective it is, means utterly relying on the provider, which a number of businesses can’t afford. So, firms may prefer a dedicated server for mission critical projects, leaving others on virtual or cloud-based ones.

Also, sometimes a customer simply has no choice but to store its data in a particular country. Usually, it’s all about compliance with applicable legislation – say, related to processing of personal data. It means that the only variant available is a physical server located in the specific country. In such a case you will have to decide on a data center; rental or colocation (if you own hardware, it would be a good idea to rent only rack space and maybe make use of the datacenter’s maintenance services.

Having your own physical datacenter is very expensive. You will have to buy costly hardware, spend a lot on skilled personnel, premises, electricity, etc. However, there is a much more budget-friendly option that has been enjoying rapidly growing popularity over recent years.

In fact, a Virtual Datacenter (vDC) is a special case of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivery model of cloud computing services. A vDC is a pool of resources - computing, storage, memory, and bandwidth - provided by cloud infrastructure. In other words, it’s a cloud data center; the multitude of actual machines providing this cloud may be distributed all over the world. It is a virtual representation of a physical datacenter, with all its servers, storage clusters and a variety of networking components, residing in virtual space usually hosted by a number of actual data centers. It results in excellent availability: such a structure is difficult to put down, compared to a single piece of hardware.

Other advantages of IaaS over traditional hosting include outstanding scalability: you will be able to add capacity or create a new IT infrastructure in no time. Also, you are charged only for the resources you consume.

What makes a vDC special is that it’s intended to satisfy the needs of enterprises. What is more, it’s a chance for a small or middle-sized firm to get a fully-functional but cheap data center. Just like with your own data center servers, you can make these resources available to applications, company’s departments and projects.

For more than a decade, HOSTKEY has been well-known for not only top quality of all its services, but also really affordable pricing. Avail yourself of a virtualized data center from HOSTKEY!