The capabilities of cloud and dedicated servers are frequently compared, but this isn’t necessarily the most effective approach. In recent years, there has been a trend in the industry towards hybrid infrastructure, which leverages the benefits of both global clouds and dedicated servers. The market offers challenges that require flexible solutions. What companies need now is the computing power of dedicated servers and the ease of scalability of cloud servers.
In this article, we will explore the features of dedicated servers and see what tasks they help businesses solve.
How Dedicated Servers Work
A dedicated server is a physical server designed for use by only one company. It can be purchased or rented from a provider. The purchase option is not suitable for everyone: capital costs raise the entry threshold and increase the risks for startups.
Servers need to be administered and properly placed. An office building is not suitable because servers need cooling, noise isolation, fire safety and uninterrupted power supply.
In addition, the provider enters into a service level agreement (SLA) and will have to refund the customer if something doesn’t go according to plan. The rental format helps companies relieve themselves of responsibility and get on with the actual tasks at hand.
The Advantages Of Dedicated Servers
The main feature of dedicated servers is that all resources belong to one company. This sounds good, but what advantages does it actually provide?
- Solving specific business problems. Servers can be configured to meet actual needs: you can add disks, CPU and RAM, install the right OS and applications.
- High performance. The hardware speeds up the process of writing and reading application data. It is a critical area for a number of different businesses, such as online stores.
- Data security. There isn’t a singular, unified standard for the storage and processing of personal data. Regulators in different countries have different requirements and penalties for this process, but businesses are risking their reputations as it is. To that end, dedicated servers serve as the most secure solution.
To build a fault-resilient infrastructure, you can, for example, place backups in the cloud and trust a cluster of dedicated servers with a database management system. In this scenario, the client will have both fast application performance, whether it is an educational platform or a marketplace, and high availability. The organization of hybrid infrastructure can take different forms depending on the nature of the business.
Obviously, hybrid infrastructure is capable of solving more problems than options built on a dedicated or cloud-only architecture. Hybrid infrastructure performance is also related to team experience and the ability to configure the connectivity of system components. The service providers do partially cover this point, but you still can’t do without your own specialists.
Dedicated servers also have disadvantages. The level of current load can be lower than the leased computing power. Then the customer has to overpay for resources he doesn’t use.
Strategic planning seems to solve most of these problems. You just need to order the right hardware in advance and negotiate with support. So, for instance, you can scale your infrastructure to the active sales season.
A lot depends on the provider’s processes. On whether they have expertise in fast assembly and replacement of components, whether they have enough hardware in stock.
What It Looks Like In Practice
To fully prepare a dedicated server for a new client, you need to perform a number of actions:
- Take a free server of the desired configuration from the pool and bind it to the client’s account.
- Allocate a new IP address and also bind it to the account.
- Prescribe settings for the network port of this server on the switch.
- Prepare a script to install the OS.
- Power up the server.
- Wait for the OS installation script to finish.
- Activate the server through the customer’s control panel and start accounting for it in the billing.
Servercore team’s 14 years of experience helped create a solution that makes it possible for the client to receive a ready-to-go server in a couple of minutes, with its components replaceable within three hours. This speed was achieved by automating processes. Only replacement of disks at the first stage is required of engineers from all manual intervention steps.
Cloud Readiness
When companies design their future infrastructure architecture, they look at providers’ solutions based on three main parameters:
→ Availability of expertise.
→ Cost of solutions.
→ Speed of providing servers.
The first parameter depends entirely on the client. The second depends on the situation on a particular market. And the third is a matter of providers’ competence.
The high level of automation has helped Servercore reduce the difference in the preparation time of dedicated and cloud servers. Any server can easily be ordered through the control panel without using support tickets. In this way, customers can flexibly scale their infrastructure and handle unplanned workloads.
Dedicated Servers As Bare Metal
That potential resource downtime has already been mentioned before, but what if we look at it from a different perspective?
Dedicated servers support virtualization, and customers can take advantage of redundant infrastructure. Multiple dedicated servers are combined together to create a robust and productive private cloud. In other words, dedicated servers can be seen as a platform for your own productivity cloud.
Why it’s cool:
- You can use your hypervisor and make your very own virtualized infrastructure.
- You can achieve maximum performance by using superfast NVMe disks, network interfaces, etc.
This helps startups solve problems related to the processing of large amounts of data or personal data, which by law requires a certain level of security.
The Conclusion
Dedicated servers are now often considered as the core of the infrastructure, a place to localize all critical services. It is an important element of hybrid infrastructure that helps businesses achieve the level of performance and fault resiliency they need.
The solution also provides a comfortable development environment that helps shorten the time between releases. At Servercore, we have learned not only to provide out-of-the-box hardware for any task, but also to do it quickly.
Having a high-performance infrastructure is crucial for businesses, as it enables them to carry out tests and regular releases with ease and convenience.