Host Your Web Application on a Virtual Rack

The ideal solution for multi-server environments and unlimited scalability

Virtual Racks are the ideal solution for hosting your business's Web application infrastructure. Virtual Racks allow clusters of servers to easily work together, providing the most cost-effective solution for customers who require unlimited server-to-server connectivity, pooled bandwidth and access to our wide array of advanced firewalls and load balancers. You can create a custom Virtual Rack solution, or start with our pre-configured Virtual Rack solution bundles.

All Virtual Rack servers come with a 100Mbps public network uplink and an unmetered 100Mbps private network connection both of which are upgradable to 1Gbps.

  Key Benefits of Our Virtual Rack Solutions

Unlimited Server-to-Server Transfer - Multiple servers within the same Virtual Rack solution have dedicated and unlimited connectivity so you don't pay for bandwidth between your servers.

Reduced Risk of Bandwidth Overages - Virtual Rack solutions offer the ability to pool bandwidth across all servers in the environment. No longer do you play the guessing game of which server will have a bandwidth overage, only to find others in your environment below their limit. Pooled bandwidth lets your servers share the bandwidth that comes included with every server.

Access to Advanced Security and Hosting Technologies - A complete hosting solution for complex environments requires advanced firewalls, load balancer, and storage solutions. Virtual Rack solutions allow customers to take advantage of these advanced solutions across their multi-server applications.

Scalability and Customization - A Virtual Rack allows you to quickly respond to changing business needs. Whether you need additional servers at a moment's notice or a new, secure network for internal communications, we quickly and professionally deliver the best solution for your business.

Globally Redundant Infrastructure Options - By using a combination of multiple data centers and advanced load balancing technology, our Virtual Rack offering can enable organizations to distribute their application across data centers in our Houston, Dallas and London facilities.

Enhance Your Virtual Rack Solution with Flexible Options

  Network Load Balancing Improves Performance

Network and server load balancing allows you to add redundancy and scalability to your Virtual Rack network more easily, which is critical to any well designed and functioning application. Load Balancing enables a group of servers to intelligently distribute service requests made to a single domain name or address, which ensures significantly greater performance from your servers and delivers multiple benefits:

Ability to Scale - Load balancers allow you to manage your IT infrastructure more efficiently as traffic volumes increase.

Flexibility - Load balancing and fail over services are built-in to a single appliance, which allows you to expertly balance your need for both performance and redundancy.

Expert Management - Our experts set up, configure, monitor and maintain the load balancers, including firmware upgrades.

An Extra Level of Security - Load balancers control the amount of traffic a particular server receives, which prevents abuse and attacks, and increases the availability of applications without blocking legitimate traffic.

Load Balancer Management - Complex network configurations require an expert management team available at a moment's notice around the clock - our highly skilled load balancer management team is available 24x7 to support your specialized deployment.

  Load Balancing:

• Assures redundancy and scalability
• Manages spikes in traffic
• Enhances performance
• Prevents abuse and attacks

  Firewall Solutions Reduce Risk

Why risk intrusion or threats to your servers that could compromise the confidentiality and integrity of your data when you can easily implement our firewall solution? Our security experts configure the firewall to meet your needs, ensuring an extra layer of defense for your servers. Key benefits of our solutions include:

Expert Deployment and Management - Our certified security experts are available 24x7 to set up, configure, monitor and maintain firewalls including firmware upgrades.

Blocking Malicious Traffic - Firewall services ensure that traffic designed to compromise your site is blocked, while enabling your employees, customers, users and partners to access your hosted application seamlessly.

Secure Remote Connectivity - VPN services through a firewall appliance secure communication privacy with IPSec VPN functionality, and provide strong encryption and authentication.

Meeting Compliance Requirements - Compliance mandates such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard require a firewall for the protection of critical data.

  Firewalls:

• Protect servers from intrusions and threats
• Block malicious traffic
• Secure remoteconnections
• Help meet policy & compliance requirements

  Direct Attached Storage Provides Added Capacity

Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is an extremely versatile dedicated solution that addresses many storage problems. Its most common uses are server expansion and low-cost clustering. For instance, if your server is running out of space, adding a DAS that can support up to 15 drives could be the perfect solution to your capacity problems. Application and database throughput is increased with the higher spindle count a DAS provides. Key benefits of our DAS solutions include:

Scale As You Grow - Drives and devices can be added as your needs expand, keeping initial costs low so you don't pay for more than you need.

Dedicated Performance - Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) architecture is both highly available and extremely fast, SAS drives, optimized for performance applications, and Near-Line SAS drives provide capacity at a great price point.

Versatile - A single Direct Attach Storage DAS can serve both database and large file-storage use cases, allowing you to mix both drive types and sizes and optimizing the device for your needs.

  Direct Attached Storage:

• Add drives and devices only as needed
• Easy server expansion & low-cost clustering
• Available for any Private Rack
• Ideal for database and large file storage

  Storage Cloud Provides Scalable On-Demand Storage

Storage Cloud is a unique offering that combines the speed and flexibility of on-premise Network Attached Storage (NAS) with global access and the usage-based billing model of a cloud storage product. Key benefits of Storage Cloud include:

Fast, On-Premise Storage with Cloud Capabilities - Aggressive pricing also offers discounts as you use more. This on-premise storage is also accessible "via the cloud," which reduces server resource utilization and the need for a separate cloud account.

Get Data Closer to Your Customers - We offer the industry's only geographically distributed cloud storage platform or Storage Delivery Network (SDN). If you have a storage-intensive business or Website, data transfer speeds can be dramatically improved by storing data close to the user. With storage nodes across the U.S., in Europe and Asia, we make it easier than ever before.

Simple Management and Integration - With a single account for managing your hosted environment and cloud storage platform Storage Cloud provides an integrated experience unmatched by other hosting or cloud storage providers. The standards-based Storage Cloud platform supports CIFS, NFS, FTP and HTTP, as well as an extensible API streamlining integration.

Cost-effective Disaster Recovery, Backup and Archiving Repository - Get data off your server and out of the data center to protect against all types of disasters, from human-error to loss of network connectivity and everything in between.

  Storage Cloud:

• On-premise and cloud storage in a single account
• Free uploads
• Only geographically distributed cloud storage platform
• Ideal as a business continuity solution

  Virtual Rack ideal for your Web-based applications

  Needed to support today's Web applications:

• Multi-tiered server environment with private backend connectivity
• Load balancing to support seamless scalability as more Web servers are added
• Firewalls to provide security and segregate network traffic
• Unpredictable and escalating storage needs with off-site replication
• Global access with instantaneous response

Virtual Racks are the perfect platform to power your application by providing flexibility that can scale as your infrastructure needs grow. We provide the datacenter, network, servers and hardware support - you worry about building the next innovative Web application.



This sample configuration illustrates how a multi-tiered Web application can be deployed in mirrored Virtual Racks in Dallas and London to rapidly scale your infrastructure to match the needs of your business.

Instant Scalability for Multi-Server Environments - Hosting servers in our Virtual Rack infrastructure give you the utmost flexibility to add additional servers to the configuration with rapid provisioning. The included private back-end network ensures all servers are linked and communicate securely.

Load Balancing for Increased Performance - Leverage load balancing options to off load session management and enhance the performance of your Web servers. This also ensures your Web traffic is optimally serviced by the available servers.

Storage Cloud Provides Globally Available, Scalable Storage Platform - Use our Storage Cloud to provide storage on-demand that is globally replicated to up to five cities around the world with a simple usage-based billing model where you pay only for what you use.

Virtual Rack Capabilities
Private backend network	Included
Pooled bandwidth	Available
Gigabit networking	Available
Cisco ASA firewalls	Available
Load balancing	Available
Direct Attached Storage (DAS)	Available
Storage Cloud	Available
Geographic redundancy	Available
Storage Area Network (SAN)	Private Rack Only
Redundant power and network	Private Rack Only
High availability configurations	Private Rack Only

Virtual Rack solutions are designed to meet the needs of multi-server, multi-tiered Web applications, additionally we offer fully customized dedicated environments via our Private Rack offering for environments that require advanced configurations.