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Managed Hosting Providers Ease SMBs IT Infrastructure Burdens

by Marc Goodman

September 03, 2008

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A company’s website is part of its branding, sales and operations functionality.  Website application IT tasks can be divided into three segments:  content management, application development and application delivery.  These must work in conjunction with one another in order to assure maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction.  It is not enough to have fancy icons, videos, and the like on the site if response times are slow.  Moreover, companies do not want to be placed in the position of having customers and users complain about a site, especially if the IT department is not aware that there are any problems.  IT organizations need to keep up with new applications and updates to existing applications and make sure that web infrastructure can keep pace with these changes.  In this article, we will focus on the benefits of website infrastructure hosting and application delivery performance.

For many small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) their website is a critical part of their operation. Along with operations, IT management must also focus on how the site and technology spending will aid in the company’s overall goals—whether they are selling products, offering an information service, or using the site for order processing and inventory management.  If the website is not working effectively, this could lead to a loss of business. 

A typical IT manager job description on careerbuilder.com reads:

“The Manager for E-Commerce Infrastructure is responsible for defining and executing the infrastructure strategy for our multi-million dollar E-Commerce business. This person is responsible for ensuring proper policies and procedures are in place to maintain adequate capacity planning, system availability, system performance, and system security. This individual will be required to manage personnel, ensuring productivity is maximized and quality work is delivered.

Responsibilities include:

• Manage team responsible for supporting our E-Commerce website's infrastructure and other assigned areas
• Actively participating in defining the strategic direction and technology roadmap for our E-Commerce website.
• Lead team in defining the technology strategy for our e-commerce infrastructure.
• Responsible for the defined service level agreements (SLA) with our company; and 
• 24x7x365 operations - evening, weekend, and holiday work will be required.”

The position includes managerial, strategic and technical work and is a highly responsible role within any organization.  Many small-to-medium sized businesses do not have the budgets to support a full IT staff and the necessary infrastructure needed for website availability and security.  While a majority of companies prefer to keep website management in-house, there is a growing market for managed hosting services.  Managed hosting providers are able to deliver network traffic and application delivery optimization solutions that otherwise would be too costly in terms of staffing and capital expense. 

Website outsourcing providers offer two primary benefits to customers. The first is the outsourcing of IT resources. Many corporations will tell you that they are understaffed for IT personnel.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for July 2008, there was a significant decline in IT jobs year over year.  The loss is attributed to cost containment and increasing the workload of individuals.  IT managers consequently are looking to find ways to offload tasks to managed hosted providers (MHPs).  While there are many qualified people seeking IT jobs, it can be difficult to find people with the skills needed by an IT department, and the cost may be prohibitive.  When the economy picks up, there is a role for outsourcing to optimize processes and accelerate growth. 

MHPs enable companies, even those with fully staffed departments, to focus on their core competencies and work on customer retention.  Moreover, outsourcing provides the opportunity for re-engineering processes by leveraging the MHP’s expertise.

Managed hosted providers have three types of offerings, namely:

Managed Services—the company owns and operates equipment at its own location.  The SMB is responsible for any hardware issues.

Managed Hosting—the gear is placed at the MHP’s datacenter and owned and operated by the MHP and shared across customers; and

Dedicated hosting—May be managed or unmanaged.  The gear is placed at the MHP’s datacenter, owned by the MHP, leased by the customer, and dedicated to a single customer.  Depending on the plan, the MHP may or may not touch the equipment.  Hardware maintenance, operating system updates and security patches, or any combination thereof, are handled by the hosting provider in some instances.

In any of the above scenarios, the customer benefits from reduced operating expense (OPEX) related to hiring and training employees and maintenance and monitoring.  For the models in which the MHP provides the equipment as a bundled offering with the service, the customer avoids the need for CAPEX to deploy an application delivery solution.  In a shared situation, customers are able to leverage the MHP’s economies of scale to take advantage of advanced technologies without being locked into owning equipment that becomes obsolete, or that the customer wants to keep in use until fully depreciated.  These economies extend across equipment to include bandwidth and management processes.  An MHP’s datacenter has the connectivity, power, rack space, cooling, security and facilities that would either be prohibitively expensive for an SMB or logistically impossible.  It also has OC-3 or higher connectivity that would be too expensive and too much bandwidth for most individual smaller businesses. 

Secondly, as small-to-medium sized businesses become more sophisticated in e-commerce, it becomes vital that websites are available 24/7, have ample bandwidth, memory and storage, and also includes redundancy, failover, load balancing and persistence.  The more available a website, the more likely the customer is to make a purchase and increase a company’s revenue.  Otherwise, a down or slow website can be as detrimental as a bricks-and-mortar store closing for several hours on a chain-wide sale day.  Moreover, there are few, if any, IT managers, who want to receive that 3AM phone call that there is a network outage or that a server is down.

MHPs also have expertise in network monitoring, traffic patterns and levels and other factors, which can make the difference in whether or not a site is running effectively.  If a company is not equipped to determine what is normal on a network, then it is not able to anticipate or recognize anomalies.  The MHP can do this along with determining where bottlenecks may reside—whether with the servers, network or applications.  For example, the MHP is able to anticipate spikes in traffic that can be attributed to a busy season, inventory or end-of-month activities.  It is unfortunate and costly when a website is not ready for peak traffic loads, while over-allocating resources leads to wasting precious dollars.

In a retail environment, e-commerce transactions are growing each year. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated total e-commerce sales for 2007 at $136.4 billion, an increase of 19.0 percent over full-year 2006 and accounting for 3.4 percent of total sales.  In comparison, total retail sales in 2007 increased only 4.0 percent.  As e-commerce continues to grow, an available website becomes vital to an SMB.

Businesses of all sizes need to optimize website uptime, reduce operating costs and avoid security issues such as denial-of-service attacks that would hinder availability.  .The MHP is able to keep websites up and running for their customers aided by application delivery controllers with additional capabilities beyond older load balancers, offering customers what they need to maintain healthy, cost-efficient networks.

Load balancers, also known as application front-end devices, application delivery controllers (ADC) and web front-ends, distribute the traffic load between two or more servers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, and offload servers from compute-intensive tasks in order to optimize resource utilization, throughput, and response time.

A View of the ADC

Specifically, an application delivery controller (ADC) is a network device that sits between the firewall or router and the server farm, which may be located in a service provider datacenter or at the customer’s premises.  The ADC provides load balancing, which distributes web and intranet traffic across two or more servers through a series of traffic rules, in order to place traffic on the best performing servers.  The newest ADCs, operating at Layer 7 and Layer 4 of the OSI model, have additional capabilities, such as SSL acceleration/offload, caching, compression and intrusion prevention (IPS) features, and are “more intelligent” than traditional load balancers.  These devices support the web sessions and connect users to server and application resources.  ADCs can be integral to business continuity, creating site resiliency, and easing management ofsite server and application IT infrastructure. 

ADCs offer SSL acceleration and offloading, persistence, compression and caching.  Each is explained below.

SSL accelerators boost the performance of SSL transactions through the use of optimized devices and association with load balancing and persistence.  Placing SSL acceleration on the ADC rather than on the server enables the offloading of the SSL handshake and encryption/decryption processes from the application servers, which dramatically increases the servers’ performance.  By offloading SSL-related tasks such as encryption/decryption to the ADC, the compute-intensive tasks are removed from the servers, allowing the servers to better handle requests. 

While load balancing in general distributes traffic across servers, persistence bypasses the normal load balancing algorithm and sends a given user to the same server each time that user makes a request.  An online shopping cart may require persistence so that the user can connect to the same web server for the duration of the session without losing the information that has been placed in a shopping cart. 

Through compressing and caching of objects the ADC helps to eliminate bottlenecks.  Compression allows ADCs to reduce the size of the application payload within each packet to decrease network bandwidth consumption without degrading content quality, and improving the end users' overall experience due to faster download times.  The ADC makes a copy of an object, which is then cached.  When that object is requested, the ADC acts as a proxy and directly sends the content to the requestor, thereby eliminating the time it would have taken to gather it from the server.

In sum, an ADC whether used by an SMB or MHP provides the tools organizations need to run an efficient and cost-effective site. 

Let’s look more closely at an MHP that is utilizing application delivery controllers.  BlackMesh, Inc., a provider of information technology solutions, offers managed hosting services to businesses, and manages all aspects of the network, hardware and operating systems.  BlackMesh provides managed infrastructure hosting, security updates, hardware replacement, firewalls, back-ups and load balancing for its customers.

Its customers’ applications are typically external-facing, transactional and need http or https load balancing with persistent connections.  These customers also require high-availability to ensure their sites are always up and running, and the flexibility to grow on an as-needed basis.  BlackMesh has positioned its company as an infrastructure and system administrator.  It is unlikely that an SMB would be able to afford to build its own datacenter with the necessary security, reinforced floors, staffing and so forth that BlackMesh offers.  With an MSP such as BlackMesh, the customer gains instant infrastructure without the need to make purchases from multiple vendors, or having to be responsible for 24/7 staffing.  In general, just the human costs of individuals to handle the technology, system administration, and other functionality is reason enough to choose an MHP rather than incur the costs.

Eric Mandel, BlackMesh CEO, explains that “whether they understand the technology or not, security is every customer’s biggest concern.”  BlackMesh, as an MHP, is an expert in what it does.  It can leverage what it has learned with one customer to serve another.  Every customer’s architecture builds on the same patterns and principles.  Therefore, it can ramp up a new customer in days, rather than the weeks it would take an SMB to do it themselves.  BlackMesh avoids having to “reinvent the wheel,” and is able to serve customers with new, top-quality equipment.  Many SMBs that do not use an MHP are stuck with older equipment due to the hassle associated with re-writing applications, evaluating vendors and transitioning from the resident equipment to the new installation. 

BlackMesh wants to provide its customers with maximum uptime and also have its own internal processes working optimally.  It chose KEMP Technologies application delivery controllers because of KEMP’s ability to offer a low-cost, high-functionality solution with an easy-to-use web interface.  The ADC is transparent to BlackMesh and its customers, but works efficiently with dedicated infrastructure in order to prevent problems before they happen. 

Occasionally there are problems even if an SMB is working with an MHP, but it is the job of the MHP to solve them quickly.  One of BlackMesh's customers was concerned about its website's ability to handle a large, anticipated traffic spike.  At that time, the customer only had one web server and they knew it would not be able to handle the rush of new visitors to the website.  They were also concerned because their website was on a single server, which is a single point of failure, and they knew if anything happened to this server they would not be able to sustain their site.  BlackMesh worked with the customer to implement a two-phased approach to improve their architecture and overall availability.  Phase One consisted of BlackMesh inserting a KEMP load balancer in front of their single web server to enable the use of multiple web servers.  In Phase Two, BlackMesh worked with the customer to deploy additional web servers behind the KEMP load balancer.  These additional servers provided the capability to handle increased traffic loads and eliminated their reliance on one single server.  The KEMP load balancer also enables BlackMesh to rapidly deploy more servers when heavier loads require more server resources than are available. 

Conclusion

As businesses look to keep pace with user demand for their products and services, more and more they are finding out that managed hosting services can deliver the cost-efficiencies, technical and physical infrastructure, security and staffing expertice that they need, The use of application delivery controllers has become an important part of this infrastructure, by enabling high-availability, greater performance, flexible scalability and application-level security. These capabilities, along with cost-efficiencies from easing the management complexities of diverse server and application infrastructure are enabling SMBs to better compete in the marketplace. Having poor website performance can destroy, or severely damage a business and its reputation. 

Websites have become critical components of most businesses’ core operations.  They support the brand and ordering process, serve as data information resources and assist in overall customer care.  Due to lack of internal resources and budget, many SMBs are turning to managed hosting providers tocost-effectively manage and maintain their sites.  By outsourcing to an MHP, companies can—to paraphrase the old advertising slogan—“leave the driving to them.”  SMBs are as in need of highly reliable and secure hosting solutions as large companies. However, SMBs need solutions that are easy to implement and cost-effective, and MHPs can be a great fit.

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