Holy Hardware, Batman!

Virtual Computers in the cloud, huh? VMs that you can set up with a couple mouse clicks, you say? That’s cute. They’re probably just toys, right? Not the kind of computer I need to do real work anyway, I betcha.

Actually, you’d be surprised. If you look under the hood, you might just be amazed at the power and the actual functionality of those VMs. The first question people always ask is about RAM. And there’s certainly some logic to that. But more than any other resource, RAM has the greatest impact on Environment cost, and should be considered against real world requirements. Cloudshare ProPlus isn’t a production environment – it’s not going to support a lot of users or a high level of traffic. It won’t require memcached or any other memory caching solution to increase performance. As a Development, Test and Demo platform, it merely needs to provide acceptable performance to the development, QA and UAT people working on the application development process, or the small group of users running the hands-on demo.

But even so, we’ve come to recognize that there are cases where 10GBs are not enough – so we are now offering the ProPlus environment with 16 or even 24GB of RAM. You should give your Cloudshare sales rep a call to see if an upgrade is right for you.

One of the most overlooked areas in the ProPlus environment is the CPU. Your ProPlus VMs all support dual processors – and those processors are no joke. Intel Xeon L5640s, they have six cores each, run at 2.27Ghz and support HyperThreading, effectively delivering support for 12 threads per processor. There is pretty much no scenario where you’ll ever find yourself processor bound in your Cloudshare environment.

And when you add to that the broad choices in Operating Systems, Databases, Software Stacks and Development Environments, all of which you provision and configure with a mouse click, you have a unique combination of power and flexibility at a price you’ll feel good about paying.

Of course, the BEST part of having a ProPlus environment is that you don’t have manage or maintain, or even THINK about the hardware. But when you think about it, that’s another blogpost all by itself.