SaaS application hosting
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Hosting with Nimbula Director
Business Challenges
As the industry shifts rapidly from traditional legacy applications to on-demand, Software- as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, companies migrating to SaaS need to adjust to this new way of delivering software. Things like rapid scaling up and down on-demand, high levels of security, continuous availability and costs all need to be taken into account when building the infrastructure on which the application will run.
In most cases, application usage grows over time, and the infrastructure needs to be adjusted, for example by adding new physical machines. In some other cases, seasonality affects demand, and the infrastructure needs to be adjusted in an optimal way to save costs. However, it is often difficult to predict how quickly an application, such as a new online game or social media application, will grow and here the infrastructure needs to meet the business needs on-demand.
Nimbula Director provides the ideal platform for hosting SaaS applications in an efficient, secure and cost effective way. It can easily scale up and out, either by adding new physical machines to quickly grow the cloud, or by reaching into the public cloud.
The Benefits:
- Rapid Scaling: A Nimbula Director cloud can grow as fast as new machines can be unwrapped and plugged into the network.
- Hybrid Cloud: Workloads can easily be launched on a public cloud, such as Amazon EC2. Workload placement is based on policies and permissions, to ensure a high level of control and security, but also to remove any bottlenecks and enable smooth deployment.
- Load Balancing: Nimbula Director’s DNS feature ensures workloads are automatically round-robin load balanced, to ensure availability and performance.
- High Availability: Nimbula Director’s self healing and self recovering mechanisms ensure the cloud is always up and running with no single points of failure.
Solution Brief
Nimbula Director delivers highly automated, self-service, elastic cloud software enabling SaaS companies to build an on-premise cloud to host their applications, with high availability and rapid scaling.
Nimbula Director can be installed in under one hour, and once installed, can easily grow based on business needs. An automated PXE boot installation that enables machines to be automatically discovered once plugged bare-metal into the network, installed and added to the pool, means that as demand for an application grows, the cloud can easily grow as well. When a demand spike is expected to be temporary or is unknown, Nimbula Director’s federation engine enables an easy scale out to an external pool of resources, based on pre-defined policies and permissions. For example, in the case of a new online game, where it is difficult to predict popularity, the system can scale from the private cloud into the public cloud seamlessly based on demand. Round-robin DNS will load balance the application workloads between private and public clouds to ensure fault tolerance and continuous availability of the system.