How Serverspace became the #1 provider thanks to the vStack platform

The international provider of cloud services Serverspace operates in seven countries with more than 5,000 customers. As virtualization systems the company uses the solution of American developer VMware and Russian hyperconverged platform vStack. It is thanks to the implementation of the solution from vStack, the provider led the top companies in terms of virtual machine performance. In this material, we will tell you how Serverspace reduced the time to create VMs, increased their performance and reduced virtualization costs.

Serverspace is an international company

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Serverspace has been working on the cloud services market for more than 14 years. During this time it has opened representative offices in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, as well as in the CIS countries and Asia. The company has five data centers in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands and the USA. In its work, the provider takes into account customer needs and focuses on the formation of a simple and affordable cloud infrastructure, characterized by increased reliability and accessibility for everyone.

Serverspace provides customers with virtual servers in clouds based on VMware and the vStack hyperconverged platform. The latter allows you to create high-performance virtual machines based on both Enterprise hardware and standard devices. With vStack, you can create a stably running server in seconds. Customers can place any amount of data in the cloud. And to quickly understand how Serverspace cloud services work, administrators and developers can take advantage of the regularly updated knowledge base.

The goal is to reduce costs and simplify administration

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For Serverspace, reliability, proven technology and a good reputation of the manufacturer are important. That is why the company initially chose VMware, the largest developer platform, as its virtualization system. This solution has successfully proved itself on the international market and has become famous among cloud users all over the world.

However, the VMware solution has not only strengths, but also weaknesses. First of all, the cost of the solution for customers is high:

• the US developer platform users need to purchase expensive equipment and provide its maintenance;
• VMware includes a serious licensing burden;
• In addition, the solution requires a large staff of highly skilled professionals, which increases the cost of personnel. In the classical approach to virtualization, the infrastructure consists of elements with specific or dedicated roles: computing, storage and networking. For each element, equipment from different vendors is used. One or two people would not be able to maintain such a complex and fragmented infrastructure.

The VMware solution was supplemented with the vStack platform

After analyzing the situation, Serverspace specialists concluded that providing VMware-based VMs required too many resources. To reduce infrastructure support costs, it was decided to move from convergence to hyperconvergence. However, switching to VMware’s HCI solution would have been even more costly. In this case, the provider would have had to increase prices for customers, which was contrary to the original intent. Therefore, it was decided to choose an additional platform that would run parallel to VMware.

The new solution was to reduce hardware and personnel costs while improving the performance of the virtual environment. The solution based on KVM and OpenStack was attractive due to the lack of license costs. But such platform would require constant revision and serious investments into development and support of the infrastructure. Testing of OpenStack performance in CPU overcommit conditions showed poor results, far from practical values in public clouds.

As a result, the Russian hyperconverged solution vStack was chosen and became one of the main solutions for Serverspace virtualization.

Advantages of vStack over other platforms

vStack is a hypercovergent platform from ITGLOBAL.COM LABS. Serverspace chose vStack in 2019 despite the fact that at that time the Russian virtualization platform had just entered the market. The reason was the hyperconverged approach, which enabled the provider to reduce hardware costs and simplify infrastructure management. In addition, the young vStack solution was as good as VMware in terms of performance.

Here are a few pros of the vStack platform:

• the native HCI solution consists of: vStack OS, vStack Storage, vStack Network and vStack Management. Hyperconverged platforms have no components with dedicated roles: storage resources, compute networking resources and virtualization tools are combined into a single platform. Manage your vStack solution through a single interface. One person is sufficient for this task, the company does not need to hire a whole team of administrators. This reduces IT infrastructure and maintenance costs and simplifies scaling;
• the developer can construct an Enterprise-level virtual data center using consumer-grade hardware without losing performance;
• overcommit CPU operation is a strong point of the vStack platform, which has enabled a significant increase in cost efficiency;
• another advantage of the hyperconverged vStack platform is the ability to quickly scale the infrastructure and replace failed elements;
• vStack virtual machine snapshots have a significant advantage: they contain the configuration, including virtual network ports;
• in addition, a vStack VM will cost the customer half as much as a VM on VMware.

With vStack Serverspace came out on top in VM performance

To save resources on maintaining the vStack hyperconverged platform, Serverspace has enabled the Managed vStack service. This allows the provider to avoid wasting time and money on platform maintenance, and direct them to the development of their own projects.

Despite having a solution from both vStack and VMware, Serverspace climbed to first place in performance by using the Russian hyperconverged vStack platform. These results are confirmed by analysts Geekbench. With vStack, it takes only one second to create a virtual machine. A new virtual machine can be available in as little as 15-40 seconds. And the cost of a vStack VM is half the price of VMware.

Also, thanks to the cooperation between Serverspace and vStack, provider customers can quickly get the functionality they need in the form of custom add-ons or platform upgrades.