Hi !

I just finished a 1.5 hour phonecall with a support services manager at the 
technical services company who supply one of my customers with all their 
hardware/software/maintenance services.

He basically brought me up to date on “how things work” today which is 
essentially that everything to do with platforms is now virtualised to allow 
them to ‘tune’ resources to demand in realtime and provide seamless, no 
downtime backup. Basically, my 4d Server is now a “cloud service” without me 
even being aware of it, it’s just that the hardware involved happens to be 
located on the preises.

In particular we discussed backup configurations for 4D server and this was 
interesting because, while I requested independent drives for logfile 
(“journal”) and datafile purposes, he essentially told me to just stick 
everything on the same drive because it was virtual anyway and had multiple 
redundancy protection via raid, 15-minute snapshotting etc. He offered to 
“create” a C: and a D: drive to make me feel better, but pointed out that 
they’re not much more independent than 2 folders would have been.

CONCLUSON
I now realise that the “WAN” / “LAN” distinction is disappearing. He said the 
only reason the “cloud” solution wasn’t hosted off-site was that they had 
measured the bandwidth that the customer used and calculated that the cost 
would be astronomical if it was on AWS or something like that, but in all other 
respects it was a cloud solution.

I was wondering, how do other major 4D server deployers optimise their 
deployment strategies to take advantage of this ? It seems a great thing that 
we are being “floated out to the cloud” without actually having to do extra 
significant work, but what about things like the backup strategy ? I don’t 
really like the idea that the log file has the same redundancy system as the 
main datafile because the whole idea is that the corruption doesn’t get 
replicated (which is what a RAID system does) and it’s independent at the 
logical level.

We seem one step away from being able to supply server solutions where “our” 
customer doesn’t have to host the database server on premises. Is anybody doing 
this at an advanced level ? (e.g. connecting with 4D client native to a 4D 
server that’s 3rd-party hosted).

Regards

Peter

**********************************************************************
4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG)
Archive:  http://lists.4d.com/archives.html
Options: https://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech
Unsub:  mailto:4d_tech-unsubscr...@lists.4d.com
**********************************************************************

Reply via email to