IaaS is smart choice for ConnectEDU

“The beauty of being in the beta was really that we weren’t paying so we could create virtual instances like there was no limit on the money we had in our pockets. We tested our beta code on some of our new products and tried massive scaling for load testing – mainly we were trying to test the limits of the system to find out how much scalability and power/performance we could get out of the environment,” he says.

Liking what it saw during the beta testing, ConnectEDU moved into production in July, Blaisdell says.

 

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“This has proven an extremely flexible model that lets us scale tens of millions of users on the system and lets us repackage all of our products in many different ways. Communications among these products can run at very, very fast speeds and very efficiently in a cloud environment, especially on the UCS platform,” he adds.

Today ConnectEDU has about 90 virtual servers, most with four virtual CPUs and between eight and 16 gigabytes of RAM, running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server. It has about 21Tbytes of storage, which is growing at a rate of 1TB per month, Blaisdell says.

With one peak period behind him since ConnectEDU’s move to NaviSite’s managed IaaS, Blaisdell has proof the decision paid off. “The beauty of the cloud environment is that you can scale up on front-end application servers, load balance them and quickly clone the ones you have so you can multiply that infrastructure 10 times in a matter of hours, and that’s one of the things we did,” he says.

Now the only physical servers at ConnectEDU itself are two domain controllers. All of its other needs are handling in the cloud, via IaaS or SaaS.

“I’m drinking the cloud Kool-Aid,” he says, “maybe more so than most people right now.”

But it’s not just a sugar high Blaisdell is experiencing. The numbers give him a nice feeling, too.

By embracing the use of public cloud services, ConnectEDU saved more than $1.6 million in infrastructure development costs in 2010, Blaisdell says. With infrastructure requirements tied directly to sales, he adds, that’s the kind of figure ConnectEDU hopes to equal or better annually.