Cloud Server FAQ

General

What resilience is provided for my server?

Your server is hosted on our VMware vSphere infrastructure. Our hosts are HP BL series units and we run our blades in an N+1 capacity where N is the amount of blades required to run all VMware images and +1 is sufficient spare capacity to cope with the failure of 1 blade server. Each blade server chassis has multiple redundant power supplies and fans.

In the event of a failure of any physical blade, the VMware HA function will automatically boot your VMware server onto another available blade.  In the event of a failure of a blade server chassis, your server will be rebooted onto a spare blade in another Cloud Data location.  In the event of a power failure at the datacentre, your server will be rebooted onto a spare blade in another Cloud Data location.

How long does failover to another Cloud Data location take?

We guarantee within our Service Level Agreement that your server will be back online with 60 minutes of a failure of any Cloud Data site.

How does Cloud Data manage failover from one datacentre to another?

Cloud Data manage a BGP network between our Datacentre locations - this means we can route IP addresses to any of our site.  We use FalconStor NSS to take snapshots at 15 minute intervals and these are replicated to a secondary datacentre location.  In the event of a datacentre failure, virtual machine images are booted up at the secondary datacentre and the most recent snapshot is mounted to the failover virtual machines.  The server will have appeared to have rebooted, as if the power were interrupted momentarily.

Will sharing hardware limit the resources available to my server?

No. We run our server infrastructure with sufficient headroom for spikes in resource requirements. VMware vCentre automatically monitors resource usage across each cluster. In the event that one of our blade servers begins to operate at higher than average capacity, VMware vSphere Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) will automatically ‘vMotion’ your server to another blade with more resource available. This process will be invisible to you – the server will run seamlessly during the move.

Backup – is my server backed up?

Yes – we take regular snapshots of all virtual machine images which are stored for 30 days according to the following schedule - 15 minute snapshots retained for 24 hours, 24 hour snapshots retained for 7 days, weekly snapshots retained for 30 days.  Should you need to roll back to a snapshot you will need to log a support request. No scheduled file backup is included with the standard product offering however you can add Cloud Data Backup as an additional service should a scheduled backup be required.

Is my server monitored?

Yes, Cloud Data monitor all customer servers using VMware vCentre and Nagios. Servers are monitored for availability (ping) and resource (Disk space, RAM and CPU) thresholds. Additional tests can be configured via our support portal for application level monitoring for no additional charge. Monitoring alerts will be sent out via e-mail and SMS where a mobile phone number has been provided.

Can I upload existing VMware images to your service?

If you have VMware VMDK files these can be either FTP’d to us or shipped to us on removable storage media (optical or USB). There is a charge for us to load your images onto our hosting platform of £99 per virtual machine image.

How do I upgrade the specification of my server?

Upgrades of RAM, Storage and processor speeds can be made. Upgrades require a server reboot – after the reboot the additional resource is immediately available. Upgrades will be billed in the next billing cycle.

Security

Is my server protected by a Firewall?

Yes, your VLAN is protected by a shared virtual appliance firewall. The default firewall ruleset has ports open for FTP, SSH, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP and HTTPS. Custom rules can be applied via the firewall management console.

Is my server protected from Virus infection?

Yes, antivirus is included in the fee and installed by default.

What stops other servers on the same physical host from accessing my server?

Your server is ‘isolated’ by the VMware Hypervisor from other servers on the same physical host. While virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer, they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate physical machines. If, for example, there are four virtual machines on a single physical server and one of the virtual machines crashes, the other three virtual machines remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the availability and security of applications running in a virtual environment is far superior to applications running in a traditional, non-virtualised system.

Storage

Where is my data stored?

All data is stored on our HP Storage Area Network (SAN). The SAN is configured in RAID 50 and is 2 way replicated to a SAN at another Cloud Data location. Connection to the SAN is via the iSCSI protocol.

Can I easily upgrade my storage as my data volumes grow?

Yes, you can upgrade or add disk space in 50GB increments.

Is data on a shared SAN visible to other customers on the SAN?

No, the data is only accessible by the server (virtual machine) configured to access the virtual disk over iSCSI.

Do you have any fibre channel storage infrastructure?

No – we only run iSCSI storage over Gigabit Ethernet. Applications requiring fibre channel performance may not perform optimally on our platform.

Networking

What is the connection speed of my server to the Internet?

Your server is connected to the Internet via a shared fast Ethernet connection with 100Mbps capacity

How is the networking configured?

Your server (or servers if you have more than one) is in its own private VLAN making it logically separate from all other servers on our network.

IP addressing – how many IP addresses are available on my server?

Each server has 1 public IP address more are available on request on completion of a RIPE allocation form – we charge an administration fee of £25 per allocation request (not per IP address). We do not charge a rental for IP addresses.

Can I have more than one server in a VLAN?

Yes, any new additional servers you order will automatically be allocated to your existing VLAN.

Data Centres

Where is the Cloud Data infrastructure hosted?

Our infrastructure is hosted in multiple secure tier 3 London data centres. We do not specify which location your server will be hosted in as we load balance all customer servers across all Cloud Data locations

Billing

What payment options are available for Cloud Server?

You can pay by cheque annually in advance, or monthly in advance by Direct Debit or credit/debit card.

What additional charges might I incur whilst using Cloud Server?

You will only incur additional charges by upgrading the specification of your server or the size of your storage partition. We include 2Mbps average bandwidth utilisation per server. In the event that your 95th percentile bandwidth utilisation regularly exceeds 2Mbps we reserve the right to charge for additional bandwidth at the rate of £20 per Mbps per month.

Support

What elements of my server are managed by Cloud Data?

Cloud Data manage the entire underlying hardware infrastructure on which your server is hosted. We manage the operating system which includes:

  • routine patching
  • basic OS troubleshooting
  • Snapshot backups

Cloud Data does not support:

  • OS administration eg creation and deletion of user accounts etc
  • Any applications installed by you on your server