Virtualisation
Simwood operates a vSphere Enterprise cloud. vSphere is the ultimate solution for virtualisation and represents a significant investment for us over recent years.
vSphere virtual machines enjoy practical bare metal performance. When you consider our typical underlying host has 24 processor cores and 196GB RAM available you should correctly conclude that virtualisation no longer represents a performance compromise. It does however present massive opportunity for dynamic scaling, high availability and flexibility.
We have migrated a large proportion of our own non-media services (e.g. billing, messaging and web) to VMs as well as virtualising key parts of customer infrastructure, both with great results. We typically find that converting physical machines to VMs yields a performance gain for the same applications on the same operating systems, just swapping physical hardware for virtual hardware.
Where our virtualisation solution adds most value is the way it can dovetail with our other Managed Services. It is perfectly feasible for customers to co-locate physical equipment with Simwood and for that to share the same private customer network(s) as virtual servers. Furthermore, Carrier Ethernet customers can mix VLANs between multiple sites, co-located equipment and virtualised equipment in almost any combination they wish, enabling the virtualisation of remote data centres or key local applications to a secure cloud that they have clean fast access to.
