virtualization – TNR Global

TNR Global Helps Northampton’s Myers Information Systems Streamline Systems in the Cloud

“TNR Global did an outstanding job and we were impressed with their professionalism, industry knowledge and fee structure. We would certainly recommend them to anyone who was seeking to improve their enterprise search and/or cloud computing solutions.”

Hadley, MA–March 27, 2012–TNR Global announced today the successful completion of a cloud based solution for Northampton headquartered broadcasting communications company Myers Information Systems.

Myers engaged with TNR to move their systems into the cloud to improve their technical agility as well as to improve security, redundancy and promote these improvements to potential customers.

“As we set out to upgrade our existing application hosting service (ProHost), we prioritized the need to adopt the highest levels of security protocols. In addition, we sought to streamline the technology stack so that transaction speeds could be optimized while at the same time set-up and annual maintenance costs reduced. Our clients count on us to be proactive when it comes to adopting new standards and technology…not only to modernize our offerings over time but to increase productivity and lower operating expenses on their end as well.” said Crist Myers, President and CEO of Myers Information Systems.

Cloud based solutions for businesses have been growing rapidly over the last 3 years. Cloud technology offers increased flexibility, elasticity and scalability which allow businesses to maximize efficiencies to serve the needs of the business. Using the cloud in combination with virtualization techniques, businesses like Myers Information Systems can leverage rapid deployments and hardware efficiencies. Companies can get more value from every server by increasing the utilization rate of their servers, drastically reducing the number of servers they need to purchase and manage.

TNR was tasked to provide an assessment of Myers systems, give recommendations based upon their needs, and to provide reference implementation and documentation.

“We created a reference system and the documentation to allow them to deploy their own systems based on that reference by using Open Stack and Rackspace Cloud” said Michael Klatsky, the VP of Systems Administration and technical lead on the project from TNR Global.

As a result they can rapidly launch a new system for a client with all the tools they need in place and they have enhanced disaster recovery capability. This allows Myers to be agile in a more secure environment, and leave them better equipped to respond to their rapidly expanding market in broadcasting.

“Myers had been relying on physical servers housed locally or on site. With this cloud based virtualization, they will be able to save money and quickly deploy additional servers based in the cloud to service new clients immediately.” said Klatsky.

TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions for content intensive websites for companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. For more information, please visit: www.tnrglobal.com

Myers Information Systems, Inc. has been developing broadcast management software since 1989. The Company provides technology and services for television, radio and other digital media providers designed to improve every aspect of their operations, from media management to scheduling, and from trafficking to reconciliation. For more information, please visit: www.myersinfosys.com

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For more information on this topic or to schedule an interview, please contact Karen E. Lynn at 413-425-1499 or email at Karen@tnrglobal.com

Cloud Platforms: The Promise vs. The Reality

Recently our VP of Search, Michael McIntosh sat down and talked to me about his thoughts on cloud computing and what businesses should be aware of when investing in the cloud.

Karen: So, how does enterprise search and cloud computing fit together? What’s good about it for companies?

Michael: The advent of cloud computing makes it a lot easier for companies to get into search without investing a huge sum of money up front. Some of the pay-as-you-go computing approaches make it possible to do things that in the past wouldn’t have been financially viable such as natural language processing on content. Something that could have taken days, weeks, or even months can now take much less time by throwing more hardware at a problem for a shorter time span.

For example, you could throw 20 machines at a problem for 12 hours and do a bunch of computations in a massively parallel way, and then stop it as soon as it’s done….versus the old model where you have to buy all the hardware, or rent it, and make sure it’s not underutilized so you make your investment back.

But if you need a lot of processing power for a short amount of time, it’s really quite amazing what we can do now with an approach like this.

Karen: Is this a new technology for TNR?

Michael: TNR has been using cloud computing platforms for several years now—3 or 4 years. Cloud computing in itself is sort of a buzz word, because distributed processing and hosting has been around for a while, but the pay-as-you-go computing model is relatively new. So we have a great deal of experience with the reality of cloud computing platforms vs. the promise of cloud computing platforms.

Karen: So, what is the difference between the “promise” and the “reality” of cloud computing platforms?

Michael: Well, A lot of people think of cloud computing as this magical thing; all their problems will be solved and it will be super dependable because there are very large businesses like Amazon running the underlying infrastructure and you don’t have to worry about it.

But, as the physical infrastructure becomes easier to deploy, other critical factors come into play. You won’t have to worry about the physical logistics of getting hardware in place. But, you will have to manage multiple instances, you have to make sure that when you provision temporary processing resources, you have to remember to retire it when it’s no longer needed. Otherwise you’ll be paying more than you need to. Since virtualization uses physical hardware you do not control or maintain—there are fewer warning signs to a potential systemic failure. Now Amazon, which is the one we use the most, does a good job of backing up instances and making things available to you even when there are failures. But we’ve had problems where we’ve lost entire zones. Even if we’ve had multiple machines configured with fault tolerance, Amazon has experienced outages that have taken entire regions offline despite every conservative effort to ensure continuous up time. So we’ve had our entire service clusters go down because of problems Amazon was having. It becomes critically important for companies to develop and maintain a disaster and recovery plan. Companies need to make sure things that are critical are backed up in multiple locations. Now historically, this has been hard to do because companies typically buy enough equipment for production needs, but not enough equipment for development and staging environments.

Karen: That sounds like a costly mistake.

Michael: It can be very costly because people often develop disaster recovery plans without ongoing testing to confirm the approach continues to work. If the approach is flawed, when you do suffer an outage, you can be offline for hours, days or weeks. Even worse, you may not be able to recover your data at all.

Karen: That sounds extremely costly.

Michael: Yes, it’s no fun at all.

There are upsides though. Some pluses are that cloud computing forces you to be more formal about how you manage your technical infrastructure. For example, for training purposes; with a new developer, we can just give them a copy of a production system, and have them go to town on it, make modifications, whatever without risking the actual production servers. And if they make a mistake, which is human (you have to factor in human error), you can reprovision a brand new one, and retire the one that is fouled up. Instead of having to spend hours and hours trying to fix the problem on the machine they were working on.

Karen: This sounds like it’s a lot more flexible and time efficient, with a layer of safety built in.

Michael: Yes. Cloud computing also comes in handy if you ever have a security breach. If a hacker gets into the system and the system is compromised–if this happens, system administrators can go in and try to correct the problem. But hackers can often install backdoors to get in and out. So a cloud platform with a good disaster contingency and backup can allow system administrators to bring a whole instance down and do the patch on a whole new machine without the security breaches and patches in place. This is pretty easy to do with a cloud platform.

Karen: So TNR can help their clients do all these things?

Michael: Yes, we’ve worked with large customers over many years and we’ve seen a wide variety of things that can possibly go wrong, and we’ve been through several physical service outages both with Amazon Web Services and with Rackspace.

Cloud computing in itself is no panacea, but if you have the technical and organization proficiency to effectively leverage the platform, it can be a powerful tool used to accelerate your company’s rate of innovation.

If you are assessing the cloud as a solution in your business, contact us. There are a variety of options for hosting that can save your company money and minimize outages. Let us show you the option that is the best fit for your organization.

Leveraging your assets: Repurposing a physical server as an OpenVZ virtual server

As an active system administrator, part of my job is determining which systems require decommissioning due to the age of the OS or for other reasons. When readying a server for retirement, we’ll take the opportunity to move and upgrade the services running on that server. Often, we are then left with a perfectly good piece of hardware that has already been paid for and is still a valuable asset. A great way to leverage this equipment is virtualization- specifically, OpenVZ.

Oftentimes, servers are underutilized- especially when it comes to development work, or when running lower impact applications. Rather than deal with multiple users on a system, apache virtual hosts for multiple websites, worrying about secure file access, or one user or customer hogging a huge amount of resources, we have found that creating multiple virtual servers using OpenVZ is an ideal solution. I won’t delve into OpenVZ deployment other than to briefly note that on our CentOS and RedHat servers, installation is as simple as adding the correct repository and installing via yum (see here for more info). Once installed, a quick reboot into the new kernel and you are ready to roll. We are running 45-50 virtual servers (VEs, or containers) on one of our 2 QUAD core CPU, 8GB RAM servers, with plenty of room to spare. I recommend running ‘vzsplit’ to generate a good configuration basis for you VEs.

Once we have installed and configured OpenVZ on our new server, we are then able to deploy a large number of VEs for individual users or customers. Each VE provides the user with the ability to have root access, update and install their own software, deploy their own applications, etc. To the user- they are on their own complete system. Should their application misbehave, it won’t affect the others on the system.

Additionally, many resources can be adjusted on the fly. Running out of disk space? Increase it on the fly. Need more memory? Increase on the fly. Live resource management such as this is a very powerful way to leverage your hardware.

We currently are using OpenVZ for CMS development, custom programming development, building custom rpms, running websites, and various other testing where we need easily deployed servers which may or may not be needed of extended periods of time.

Virtualizing our own equipment in this way makes great economic sense for several reasons-. We are using a server which we already own, thus helping us increase our “green” sensibilities by keeping this system out of the landfill. We eliminate the need for more servers for development work. We can even host paying customers, thus deriving income from the hardware. Using our own equipment also helps us keep costs lower by lessening the need to move data and applications offsite to providers such as Slicehost. Slicehost has it’s place- and, in fact, we use them for certain applications- but they do not provide the versatility necessary for much of our development work.
In summary, by leveraging existing, underutilized or potentially retired hardware, you can save money in reduced additional hardware costs, derive income and help the environment. Additionally, the agility in development and deployment that we gain simply adds another layer to the economic advantages that we gain.That sounds like a good plan to me!

Cloud Computing and Virtualization for Big Data

Cloud Computing and Virtualization Services

TNR Global offers different cloud computing and virtualization solutions depending upon your needs. Whether you run your own data center, or want to run on hosted infrastructure services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Rackspace Hosting, we can assist in assessing costs and performing migrations to the cloud. We have the expertise to leverage the full spectrum of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace to work for small and mid-sized businesses, laboratories and organizations. We have over 4 years of experience in cloud computing platforms. Our extensive knowledge of the AWS platform and tools allows you to avoid costly mistakes and false starts, getting you up and running quickly, securely and scaled just right.

Virtualization:

We can help you improve your IT infrastructure with a Virtualization Platform. Virtualization reduces expense, consolidates servers, reduces overall downtime, and improves efficiencies through automation. We use Open VZ, Virtuozzo, Xen and Eucalyptus virtaulization technologies to streamline your IT department.

Migration:

We create a cloud computing environment tailored to the requirements of your application or development needs. We specialize in methodologies and tools that help in migration, porting, testing, and emulating systems in the cloud.

Custom AMIs:

TNR Global can create your own Custom Amazon Machine Image that will wrap your operating system, domain specific tools and applications, and shared data in one easily deployable package.

IT Outsourcing:

At TNR Global we believe in freeing innovators to innovate. Our deployment and maintenance services allow businesses and laboratories of any size to utilize highly secure, enterprise quality, massively scalable IT infrastructure and experienced, dedicated and available staff.

Consulting Services:

cost comparisons and risk assessment for application hosting: ‘in the cloud’ vs. traditional data centers
security audits
suggestions for integration and best use of new services from AWS including ingestion and structure of your data
solutions specifications development
solutions implementation

Since the fall of 2007, TNR Global has been working with Amazon Web Services and specifically Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services to help mid-sized companies leverage the benefits of the cloud computing platform. Cloud computing offers application vendors, publishers, and researchers increased agility/time to market, elasticity, minimal capital expenditure, and pay-as-you-go pricing.

TNR Global specializes in methodologies and tools that help in migration, porting, testing and emulating applications in the cloud.

We offer expertise on the full spectrum of services related to Amazon Web Services. Our experts will work with you to provide cost comparisons and risk assessment for application hosting ‘in the cloud’ versus traditional data centers for ongoing deployment, shorter-term prototyping or even one-time computations. If it is determined that AWS is the best alternative, we provide efficient, secure, cost-effective and properly scaled configuration, creation, and deployment of application platforms using the full range of AWS offerings. Our expertise in building custom images on EC2 allows us to offer unique solutions tailored for each customer.

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Migrating an OpenVZ Virtual Machine

One of the great features of OpenVZ is the ability to easily migrate a virtual machine(VM) to another server. While identifying the best methods to perform this task recently, I read about two tools to accomplish this task: vzdump, and vzmigrate. Continue reading “Migrating an OpenVZ Virtual Machine”