eApps Hosting – a premier provider of application hosting services since 1996, serving more than 5000 customers. Hosting over 15,000 domains in more than 125 countries…. and trusting StorPool storage for the high performance and reliability of its storage system. We met Richard Lingsch, CEO of eApps at World Hosting Days Global 2017. We took the opportunity to have a short chat with him about distributed storage and the benefits it brings to the hosting providers.
Hosting challenges resolved with software-defined storage (SDS)
Richard Lingsch explained that storage is one of the most challenging problems in the hosting industry. Before StorPool, eApps hosting used a traditional redundant SAN with off the shelf hardware and commercial SAN software. The previous system was not based on SSD and the old SAN software required a lot of overhead. Thus eApps went shopping for a new solution.
They found StorPool by a recommendation and met StorPool initially at HostingCon 2016.
“We performed some really intense testing internally and it came really, really well”, says Richard.
While the traditional storage system was very expensive, the architecture of StorPool allowed eApps hosting to deliver much better performance in a more cost-effective way. They chose StorPool due to the solid boost in performance, coupled with reliability and scalability. And moreover, eApps technical team was very happy because managing StorPool was much simpler than the previous storage systems they used.
“I have to talk about the financial side of it as well”, said Richard, “Our CFO was even happier than our technical guys”.
Predictions for the future of hosting and storage systems
eApps is a hosting provider with solid expertise and long market experience, so it was the perfect chance to ask their CEO what are his predictions for the future of the hosting industry. Richard Lingsch shared with us that one of the most notable changes is that the clients’ are focusing on increasing high availability. People have started thinking more and more about geographic redundancy and replication of data across physical data centers. The good point is that awareness of that need is rising and people recognize the importance of having stability and no single point of failure in their infrastructure.
This is also one of the biggest advantages of StorPool’s distributed storage software. Due to the fully-distributed architecture of the solution, we provide unmatched reliability and true HA (high availability), plus remote site backup and DR functionality.
Other trends that are gaining steam are around backup, DR and the transition from traditional hosting to a more MSP (Managed Service Provider) approach, where the hosting company provides a higher level of services and manages IT infrastructure or entire applications on the behalf of the end client.
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