Virtual machine cloud provider Memset has brought a new clustering and vLAN facility to market with its Miniserver VM service. The new delivery framework aims to provide cheaper enterprise-level resilience and security by using a mixture of both virtual and physical servers.
Memset's Miniserver VMs and dedicated servers share the same vLAN using the company's own load balancing and clustering software to manage this combination of virtual and physical servers.
Where a customer would normally have to rent a cluster of fully dedicated servers to achieve enterprise-level resilience, Memset says it is able to deliver the same levels of resilience at a lower cost by bringing virtual machines (VMs) into the mix.
The proposition here is that a mid-sized enterprise application needs a powerful database dedicated server at its core, as well as a number of lightweight front-end nodes, which in this case will be virtual machines.
"Allowing VMs to share a vLAN greatly enhances security of virtual server deployments by allowing entirely secure communications between the VMs. In the past the lack of such facilities has led to security concerns over cloud computing," says Memset's Kate Craig-Wood. "The alternative would either be an entirely dedicated cluster, or re-writing the application to use a non-relational, scalable database, which is not always practical."
