Why Cloud Servers Are The Right Choice For Businesses

Aruba presents its new Cloud computing offer: PRO and VPS servers for professionals and businesses based on three different hypervisors and the latest technologies. We give a guide to choosing the best service for your business.

When the business grows, Cloud servers are the correct answer regarding reliability, availability, performance, flexibility, and versatility. However, not all Cloud service providers are the same: the key to success is choosing a partner capable of providing a scalable configuration, easy to adapt to the changing needs of the professional and the company.

Aruba’s Cloud Computing has undergone a substantial evolution in terms of the range of offerings and performance. With the innovations presented in October 2022, the Aruba Cloud is updated with an even more comprehensive range of servers and hypervisors: from the cheapest VPS to increasingly powerful and customizable virtual servers. The new Aruba Cloud Computing offer, which we describe in depth below, is based on three cornerstones:

More choices of available configurations, price ranges, hypervisors, and SLAs.
More technology thanks to redundant enterprise-level architecture, top vendor, and latest generation hardware (NVMe SAN, Redundant SAN SSD, NVMe, local SSD, and latest generation Intel/AMD processors).
More certainties with maximum transparency in data management, specific and predictable prices, and performance (traffic included and guaranteed resources).

The hypervisor is the central and crucial component of a system based on virtual machines: Aruba is the only provider in Europe to allow users to choose between systems based on three different hypervisors, namely VMware, Hyper-V, and OpenStack, the latter free and open source software. Aruba offers the opportunity to choose the hypervisors to use freely.

Thus, for example, it is possible to configure an inexpensive OpenStack-based Cloud server in just a few minutes or create Hyper-V or VMware virtual machines. Aruba’s Cloud services can be tried at no cost. All new customers can activate and use the Cloud for free, with a credit of 100 euros for companies and 20 euros for private users.

A strong discontinuity marks Aruba’s new Cloud offer concerning the previous approach: the PRO server configurations based on VMware and Hyper-V are enriched with those built on OpenStack ( general purpose and “Memory”; more on that later). Alongside the PRO servers, Aruba debuts a much more comprehensive range of VPS servers whose foundations are built on hypervisors such as VMware and OpenStack.

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Create A Cloud Server And Personal Network Infrastructure

The Aruba Cloud Computing range, renewed and broader than in the past, can be used by the professional to create a single Cloud server or by the company, regardless of its size, to set up its private Cloud solution (including possible hybrid configurations).

The Aruba cloud server creation procedure allows you to choose the hypervisor you prefer to use, select one of the templates available and define the characteristics of the machine in terms of CPU, RAM, storage, and connectivity.

For each system, one or more virtual network cards can be used, and each of them possibly associated with an IP address, both public and private. With the Aruba Cloud, it is possible to set up a single server. Above all, a virtual infrastructure can be created on the Cloud by combining virtual servers, virtual switches, balancers, and unified storage.

You can then create several servers, interconnect them using a virtual switch and, for example, protect them with a system that acts as a firewall. Aruba provides templates based on the well-known and appreciated open-source distribution offense.

It is possible to protect Cloud servers with pfSense by activating a firewall to allow traffic that must be managed in both directions and block unauthorized traffic. Always with pfSense or other solutions, a VPN server can also be set up to connect to one’s private cloud infrastructure as if a PC were physically attached to the virtual switch or the single system.

Costs: Predictability And Certainty

Costs represent one of the aspects on which users focus the most, together with the performance issue. With the new Aruba offer, the costs are even more explicit: the virtual machine “auto composition” procedure clearly shows the hourly, monthly, and annual fees depending on the selected configuration.

The approach proposed by Aruba is a winner because each customer can immediately know how much they will spend in the various time windows and instantly evaluate the estimated TCO for any activity. Compared to hyper scalers, Aruba’s exclusive offer is characterized by much lower costs with the certainty of maximum predictability of investments and expenses.

Thanks to the hyper-converged architecture of OpenStack (all nodes are the same and provide control, processing, network, and storage services), which since October 2022 Aruba has added to the proposals based on VMware and Hyper-V technology, it is possible to contain costs further.

Being a free and open-source platform, Aruba does not have to incur additional licensing costs, and the benefits can thus be directly passed on to customers. Among the many configurations available, you can have a Linux VPS always based on OpenStack, eight vCPU, 16 GB of RAM, and 160 GB of NVMe storage for only 18.20 euros per month. A VPS configuration that takes advantage of the VMware hypervisor with four vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 160 GB of NVMe storage is offered at 29.83 euros per month,

Which is already an attractive price when compared with Aruba’s main competitors. Again, with the Aruba Cloud, you can have a Linux machine based on OpenStack in the public Cloud with guaranteed resources, networking possibilities, four vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 120 GB of SSD storage for just 31.20 euros per month. A price that today appears unbeatable.

Difference Between New VPS And PRO Aruba Servers

As mentioned above, the new Aruba offer allows you to configure and purchase VPS and PRO servers. The choice of hypervisor (VMware, Hyper-V, and OpenStack) is available for both VPS and PRO servers. For Hyper-V VPS, it is not foreseen.

PRO servers

PRO Aruba servers are the Cloud virtual machines that offer, by far, the best customization possibilities and the most comprehensive choice in terms of versatility and performance. The choice of vCPU, RAM, and storage is free: the user selects the characteristics of the Cloud server, and Aruba indicates the costs for the selected configuration. The most significant degree of customization concerns VMware and Hyper-V machines; for OpenStack, you can choose from several preset designs.

In terms of templates (operating system and other pre-installed software components that are found when the machine is first started), the PRO servers provide the most comprehensive choice ever: you can choose between the leading operating systems (including the principal Linux distributions and various versions and editions of Windows Server) and platforms suitable to handle specific needs.

Furthermore, each PRO Aruba server can use up to 5 public IP addresses (one is free and included in the introductory offer), manage unlimited traffic, and be inserted in a virtual private network made up of other systems, switches, firewalls, load balancers, data storage solutions and so on.

Regarding uptime or continuity of service, PRO servers offer the best guarantees with an SLA ( Service Level Agreement ) of 99.95%. Among the most interesting new features, Aruba offers the possibility of creating and using Memory virtual servers: these machines offer a significant amount of RAM. They are, therefore, suitable for supporting mission-critical applications that require even higher performance.

A 4:1 RAM/CPU ratio characterizes the new Memory virtual servers proposed by Aruba; they are particularly suitable for large amounts of memory.PRO Aruba servers use a redundant SAN ( Storage Area Network ), which, among other things, allows you to maximize data reading and write performance for each Cloud machine.

In the case of PRO servers, the configuration of the machines is scalable both upwards and downwards. By acting on the administration panel, it is possible to expand or reduce the resources assigned to each system. Aruba charges only the hourly consumption of each resource: this is a value known even before the creation of the Cloud server.

VPS Servers

Aruba’s VPS servers represent a valid alternative to the PROs: they are cheaper. They are indicated when redundancy is not required, there is no need to insert the machine in a virtual private network (as we have seen previously), and it is sufficient to use only public IP addresses. It can have unlimited incoming and outgoing data traffic.

Suppose the PRO servers allow you to freely set the configuration of each machine in terms of CPU, RAM, storage, and network cards, in the case of VPS. In that case, Aruba offers a “selection” of predefined configurations from which you can choose. On the storage side, the new, more performing OpenStack VPS servers are also based on the NVMe SAN solution, like the PRO servers.

Difference Between OpenStack, Hyper-V, And VMware

Although OpenStack, Hyper-V, and VMware overlap in terms of functionality, there are some essential differences between the three technologies: they leverage different architectures and ecosystems. VMware began as a data center-level virtualization solution. Hyper-V is a native hypervisor that allows you to create and manage virtual machines on Windows systems based on x86-64 processors.

OpenStack is the leading open-source cloud technology that provides an infrastructure platform for building and deploying cloud-aware applications. In the case of Aruba, VMware machines can be configured with between 1 and 16 virtual CPUs ( vCPUs ). Each virtual machine can also use between 1 and 64 GB of RAM.

Virtual machines that take advantage of Hyper-V and OpenStack are instead offered at a lower cost. In the case of Hyper-V, they can be created with several vCPUs between 1 and 8 by combining from 1 to 32 GB of RAM. OpenStack-based Aruba Cloud servers are even more flexible by providing up to 32 vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM.

Choosing OpenStack can help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO ) associated with your cloud infrastructure’s initial deployment and management, whether it’s a single server or a battery of interconnected systems. In the case of Hyper-V, Aruba still includes the cost of the Windows Server license in the price of the vCPUs of the PRO servers, ensuring maximum savings when the Cloud server is off.

How To Choose An Aruba Service For Cloud Computing

When it comes to Cloud services, users usually make some concrete requests expecting high availability ( uptime ), adequate performance for the chosen machine, complete and pre-packaged templates, security configurations to “enclose” the machine, the possibility of creating a Cloud infrastructure ease of management (from a web panel/browser, for example with a dedicated console).

Aruba Cloud Computing provides pertinent and up-to-the-situation answers to all these questions, distinguishing itself by power and performance, price/performance ratio, choice and flexibility, redundancy and guaranteed resources (with PRO servers), and the best available technology.

You can opt for OpenStack, Hyper-V, and VMware by evaluating the investment and, above all, opt for a VPS server if you don’t have significant needs (for example, also to create development and testing environments) instead looking at PRO servers when you need even greater guarantees in terms of availability (SLA 99.95%) and customization of the machine.

PRO servers are the best and most obvious choice for companies that intend to move all or most of their workflows to the Cloud by simplifying the on-premise infrastructure, reducing costs also thanks to systems that no longer need to be updated and maintained as far as the hardware configuration is concerned (the latter aspect is totally up to Aruba).

With VPS servers, the protection of the single machine is limited to the configuration of the software firewall provided by the installed operating system. On the other hand, PRO servers can be “enclosed” and protected by creating a private Cloud infrastructure, using the resources that Aruba makes available, and only exposing the resources that must be reachable from the WAN.

The PRO servers can be scaled both up and down: as explained in the introduction, the configuration of the machine can be dynamically adapted to the changing needs of your business by modifying, if necessary, the allocation of CPU and RAM. This way, you can only pay for the resources you use. To try Aruba Cloud Computing without paying a penny, you can take advantage of the free credit of 100 euros for companies and 20 euros for private users.

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