Rentable virtual infrastructure: right for you?

What gets Matthew Porter, the CEO of Contegix, most excited about virtualization is the technology's ability to solve his customers' problems -- most importantly, their needs for better hardware utilization and speedier server provisioning and application delivery.

"If it wasn't doing that, there's no reason why we would ever do it," says Porter, who is also the founder of the St. Louis-based managed hosting provider. "We're not using it because it's an industry buzz word or it's showing up in a magic quadrant."

Contegix provides the equipment and manages the infrastructure and operating system for its customers, who pay monthly fees for the services. The hardware is dedicated for single-customer use, so there's significant advantage for any customer who uses a server to its utmost capability. Because virtualization technology lets an administrator carve up a single processor to run multiple distinct copies of an operating system, the customer is able to use a greater percentage of the server's processing power.

But the virtualization benefit that is becoming perhaps even more critical for Contegix is the opportunity to provision servers and deploy applications and upgrades far more quickly -- a capability that is especially important for its partners and vendors that sell SaaS (software as a service).

Sydney, Australia-based Atlassian Pty Ltd., for instance, offers its integrated Jira Studio development tool suite as a hosted service that can be deployed within 24 hours, or considerably less. Customers buy the suite from Atlassian, then Contegix, its partner, gets them up and running. Once it has a virtual machine image of Jira Studio to use as a template, Contegix can roll out the tool suite to new customers with ease.

"With the physical host already there, we can take that application and deliver it, from start to finish, with all the components that it needs, in 10 to 15 minutes," says Porter.

Contegix dedicates hardware exclusively to Atlassian's Jira Studio users. Multiple customers may run the tool suite on the same box, but each has its own virtual machine image.

"As their needs grow, it's easy to move them to larger boxes. There's a much greater degree of flexibility than without virtual machines," says Michael Knighten, manager of hosted services at Atlassian. The flexibility extends to fail-over, he added, because the standardized virtual images can easily be replicated and switched.

Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner, says service providers used to promote superior practices and processes, but today, they're increasingly differentiating themselves based on quality of service and agility. Virtualization plays into that trend, because it can help users to deploy servers 30 times faster, on average, he added.

"That has changed the nature of the business," Bittman says.