Server management and virtualization
Customer
The customer is a large public company with 3,300 employees and $630 million in annual sales. They are a leading provider of server virtualization services, including Server Based Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. They offer superior services at a fraction of their competitors' price.
Business Needs
The customer must provide a variety of "last-mile" features over the full line of their product suite: server infrastructure, server management, security, client access, device drivers and more. They provide those services for a wide range of environments and operating systems, including Linux, Windows and Macintosh. SolovatSoft was ideally placed to help them with the variety of top quality talent and experience available over the full range of their needs.
Our US-based project management helped them to react quickly to changing customer needs, allowing them to begin new projects, adjust ongoing projects to changing needs: and, of course, complete projects quickly and bring them to market.
The reduced cost of offshore Russian overhead, saving our customers up to 60%, allowed them to offer the quality features they required while managing costs to preserve their competitive price advantage.
Server Infrastructure
Server virtualization can be made much more efficient by booting many
different virtual server instances from a single disk image (with proper
licensing), rather than requiring a separately installed operating system
for each instance. Using a single image for multiple instances of the
Windows operating system presents considerable technical challenges:
- Identification: Different instances of the same boot image
must present different identifying information; this information is
typically hard-coded in the boot image.
- Authentication: Access to resources is controlled by authenticating specific identifying
information. This authentication information is typically hard-coded to
match the hard-coded identification information, and must be synchronized
to correctly control access.
- Licensing: Multiple instances of the
same boot image must be carefully controlled to ensure each instance is
legally licensed.
- Version Compatibility: Different versions
of Windows have subtle differences in the boot process and other relevant
components.
Our expertise with Windows system internals allowed us to create a system
to quickly boot multiple instances of a single physical image, for several
versions of Windows. And unlike the customer's competition, SolovatSoft's
solution maintains best security practices.
Security
Securing communications to mission-critical systems is a vitally important
requirement for server virtualization. Our developers provided an
extensible, configurable solution to authenticate users and encrypt
traffic to and from virtual servers.
- Supports a variety of authentication mechanisms
- Can operate stand-alone or through a web browser
- Compatible with a variety of other security products requiring
HTTP/HTTPS encapsulation.
Server Management
Using our experience with applications development and client-server
systems development, we were able to substantially extend the customer's
server management utility to allow systems administrators to quickly and
efficiently manage groups of servers and groups of server clusters with
common settings and features.
Client Access
To make use of Server Based Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure,
dozens, hundreds or even thousands of users actually use the provided
servers and clusters. Our experience in a wide range of languages and
environments allowed us to quickly provide software to make the portal
efficient and natural in any environment. We extended the portal to a
variety of platforms, including Macintosh, Linux, Windows, Java and any
web browser. All this functionality was provided while maintaining the
high standards of the original portal.
- Consistency of appearance and functionality across platforms
- Complicated remote application protocols across platforms
Device Drivers
Server virtualization requires more than just sharing and balancing access
to CPU, RAM and disk space. An important component missing from many
virtualization solutions is shared access to the explosion of USB devices,
not only printers but scanners, cameras, webcams, CD and DVD burners, and
an ever-expanding list of new devices. Our systems engineers created a
solution to share USB devices not just within a single operating-system
family, but across multiple operating systems and environments. For
example, one user can plug a USB scanner into her Macintosh and her
neighbor can use it on his Windows machine as if it were plugged in
locally.
- Requires getting in "underneath" the USB drivers on multiple
platforms
- Deep understanding of USB protocols and data
- Efficient communications and fast response times
