Cloud at certain costs and for every need: the Aruba offer

According to a recent survey carried out by the Digital Innovation Observatory in SMEs of the Politecnico di Milano, just 30.4% of the small and medium-sized enterprises interviewed reported that they use an IT infrastructure entirely or mainly based on the Cloud for their business, on the other hand more of 32% of the sample would still refer to on-premises solutions, therefore developed on site, or would make use of Cloud solutions only minimally.

Given the numerous benefits deriving from the adoption of the Cloud, especially in terms of scalability, cost containment and reduction of the complexity of the technical infrastructure, this could therefore be the right time to obtain a significant competitive advantage from a migration to this configuration. Opting for the Cloud, however, means relying on a provider that provides this type of service in outsourcing, an operator who must offer solid guarantees in terms of reliability and security. What are the fundamental criteria for the choice?

The criteria for the choice of a Cloud Provider

If you want to answer the question posed above, it is possible to refer to some aspects, corresponding to as many questions , which should be taken into consideration before planning your investment:

what are the services that are made available? Are the solutions provided by the provider customizable based on the specific needs of a company? are tools available to keep spending under control and optimize costs? what are the guarantees offered by the provider in terms of technical infrastructure, security and compliance with data processing regulations? Are there testimonials, opinions and reviews of customers who have been able to use the platform? last but not least, does the provider provide comprehensive documentation and customer support to help address any management issues? A useful way to express your assessment could be to use a company in the sector that has already been established and tested by a good number of customers as a term of comparison. In this regard, it is possible to refer to a reality like Aruba, the largest Italian Cloud provider, which currently has more than 400,000 virtual servers created in public and private Clouds, over 200,000 customers served in more than 150 countries and has more than 200 thousand square meters of total area dedicated to data centers and technology campuses where it operates through proprietary infrastructures.

Aruba's Cloud Offer

The range of services of Aruba extends from VPS (Virtual Private Server) to the Private Cloud, up to the creation of customized solutions that are also very complex and adaptable to the needs of the most structured companies. The infrastructures that can be activated concern all the Cloud computing models currently required by the market:

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): with solutions for the Public Cloud, the Private Cloud and the hybrid Cloud; PaaS (Platform as a Service): with the Jelastic Cloud service that guarantees maximum scalability of virtualized resources through the combination of the PaaS model and the CaaS model (Container as a Service); SaaS (Software as a Service): with which to dynamically manage installations based on WordPress, the most used CMS (Content Management System) on the Net, or the Magento e-commerce engine, archive documents and develop collaborative projects with the support of Nextcloud storage or independently create a video conferencing system with Jitsi Meet for communications within an organization. Dedicated clouds, dedicated servers and housing: with offers differentiated by technical characteristics, performance level, flexibility and infrastructure scalability suitable for all needs. Housing and Colocation Solutions, for those who need to use proprietary hardware to be hosted in a high-performance server environment, and Rack for those who want to have one or more cabinets completely dedicated to their own servers. The configurations previously indicated refer to some key keywords for choosing the most suitable Cloud based service for your business, that is, to features that correspond to as many offers to be taken into consideration before purchasing. Let's analyze them in detail.

Public Cloud

The Public Cloud is a Cloud delivery model in which the provision of services is carried out through virtualized resources that are shared according to the so-called multitenant logic, that is among all users. From this point of view, Aruba's offer includes:

Cloud PRO, an IaaS service with which to create Cloud infrastructures based on redundant hardware with guaranteed resources. Also compliant with the legal requirements for the use by Public Administrations or operators of cloud services for the PA, the service allows you to create virtual mini data centers with server, network and storage components, customizable and resizable in real time through technologies VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Cloud VPS can be activated in a simple and immediate way within a totally Cloud infrastructure in which preconfigured machines divided by size with increasing technical characteristics operate, all based on VMware technology and SSD storage.

Private Cloud

The Private Cloud and the Public Cloud have several characteristics in common, but in the specific case of the former, the hardware resources are dedicated entirely to a single organization or user. Basically, the Private Cloud provides the advantages of the Public Cloud, starting with scalability, while offering greater levels of control and customization. Among the Aruba proposals for the Private Cloud we therefore find:

Virtual Private: with which to create, extend and reduce your own virtual Data Center according to the different needs of the reference business and the project you want to develop. Dedicated Cloud: for the maximum possible customization of the technical infrastructure. IaaS for SAP HANA: considered one of the best systems available on the market today for managing databases.

Solutions for Networking

Aruba's offer dedicated to Cloud Computing guarantees a network connection of up to 1000 Mbit / s for all Cloud Servers. Compared to the services of other competitors, Aruba's Cloud Server Pro can be connected to each other using Virtual Switches as would happen in a real physical structure. Each Cloud Server Pro has 3 Network Cards that can be connected to Public IPs to have Internet connectivity and to Virtual Switches for VPN creation.

For Cloud Server Pro there are no bandwidth limits, while in the case of the Cloud Server Smart the traffic towards the Internet is limited according to the size selected by the user.

It is also offered the possibility to configure your balancers with a few clicks, directly from the Control Panel. The latter allow you to distribute the workload by balancing it between two or more Cloud Servers. The resources of the infrastructure are thus optimized ensuring continuity of service, limiting overloads, reducing response times and maximizing productivity.

Storage in the Cloud

Having large amounts of space is a fundamental requirement for different types of services, for this reason it is essential to have Cloud servers that, in addition to guaranteeing a large basic storage, allow it to be extended according to the needs dictated by the amount of managed content.

In this regard, it is useful to point out that the Object Storag service is from Aruba. It can also be used for just one hour depending on your needs, it does not include any activation costs and can be used by choosing between pay-per-use or package rates.

Aruba's Unified Storage also natively provides a high amount of disk space for the storage connected to your Virtual LAN. In terms of functionality, this service can be equated to a SAN or NAS device and allows you to store large quantities of resources making them available to the Cloud Server Pro connected to the same virtual network, exactly as it would happen with a shared disk.

Security: Backup and DRaaS

As regards data security, the Aruba Cloud Backup service can be purchased both in consumption mode, in increments of 10 GB, and in predefined space packages for archiving. In this regard, it is useful to keep in mind that the choice of the tariff plan does not represent a constraint and will depend on the characteristics of your project, it can be modified at any time and each backup account can be associated with a different tariff plan of your choice.

For a limited number of upload and download operations, a pay-as-you-go plan may be more suitable, one of the package tariff plans chosen based on the size of space needed may be more suitable in the case of use Frequently.

A further study should be dedicated to the Cloud Bare Metal Backup service which, thanks to the collaboration with the availability solutions provider Veeam, allows you to perform backups based on remote images of virtual machines in the Private Cloud and operates in association with the virtualization hypervisor.

Without the need for VMs equipped with backup agents, via C loud Bare Metal Backup it is possible to restore a complete machine on the original host or on another host, complete with support for quick rollback with which to restore only the blocks that have been modified. All this takes place with minimal overhead as this procedure does not involve the network capacity and VM resources. Cloud Bare Metal Backup can be used in a complementary way with Cloud Backup to obtain physical, virtual, application and therefore total data protection.

Still from the point of view of security, the DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) allows you to protect your technical infrastructure both within a company and on the Aruba Private Cloud. The self-service panel accessible from the Internet allows you to independently create Disaster Recovery plans and policies, selecting a source site and a destination site from the on-premise VMware virtual infrastructures and / or the Aruba data centers enabled for Private Cloud. Replicas between remote sites can thus be generated in a few minutes and fully functional Disaster Recovery procedures can be activated.

For greater safety, the operation of a Disaster Recovery procedure can be verified by launching a Disaster Recovery test that runs an attempt to recover by activating the machines on the destination site without interfering with the production ones on the source site.

The "Managed" option is also available with which to manage the entire life cycle of your Disaster Recovery for Aruba's qualified technical staff.

Services under control with Cloud Monitoring

The Aruba Cloud Monitoring service allows you to monitor Internet sites, Cloud Servers and dedicated servers residing in the data a center in Aruba or hosted by other providers. Cloud Monitoring will automatically send an immediate notification via email, and optionally via SMS, reporting anomalies or errors in real time.

The control panel graphics allow you to record and analyze the activities of the monitored services in order to easily identify any problems and their periodicity.

Through the Control Panel it is possible to monitor services and protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, SSL, DNS, FTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle , PostgreSQL and many other processes commonly active in a Web based infrastructure.

For each check you can set its frequency, maximum waiting timeout for the positive response, the number of failed checks before a notification and the regions from which to perform the checks. From a single Panel it is possible to manage all the controls created even if activated on different geographical regions.

Personalization, case study and documentation

Aruba's Cloud solutions have been conceived to meet any type of need and activity: companies and professionals who are looking for flexible and secure solutions for the digitization of their business, large companies that need a partner in the design of complex infrastructures, Developers who are looking for a safe development environment and complete, software house, Web agency, IT consultant, Public Administrations, gamers, individuals and in general anyone who wants to join an offer which is easy to estimate costs and can be checked at any time shopping without hidden costs.

In this regard, the Aruba site presents sections dedicated to case studies and the innovation stories of companies and organizations (SISAL, Ducati, Orangepix, University of Padua, Brembo ..) who have chosen its Cloud solutions for the growth of their business, their services and their research centers.



These solutions are documented in detail thanks to a series of tutorials easily accessible also thanks to a special search engine and dedicated to all the main aspects of interest to users, system administrators and developers.

For more information on Aruba Cloud products and services, please refer to to the official website of the platform.

In collaboration with Aruba