Frequently Asked Questions

• What's the difference with a private cloud and a public cloud?
• One primary difference between a private and public cloud is the location of the platform. For example, a cloud where multiple clients can set up virtual machines on the same cloud is considered a public cloud. These virtual machine deployments are not in YOUR private enterprise location.
  
  The major benefit of a private cloud is the local control and access to your cloud. The private cloud cost is higher as you must purchase your own hardware, but the benefits are a more controlled enviornment without "outsiders" on your network. Whereas the public cloud, hosted on larger public infrastructures is less costly, but is being shared with others. Depending on the cloud platform, security might be an issue.
  
  IronCloud offers both private and public cloud platforms. Our "Private Turnkey Systems" are customized and pre-configured cloud platforms which include all of the necessary cloud services, from hardware (servers and switches), software (all operating systems, hypervisors, and storage), to datacenter colocation and 24/7 support. Keep in mind that you can build your own private cloud with a small hardware investment. Traditionally, many assume that building your own private cloud is very costly, however, with a couple of servers and a SAN, you can build an excellent secure private cloud platform.
• Can you tell me more about the IronCloud public cloud offering?
• IronCloud has a powerful and elastic public cloud offering, in addition to being one of the most secure. The IronCloud (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud platform is built on the latest hardware with multiple locations and networks. With raw (block) storage and networking, clients can build their own VIRTUAL private infrastructures using the most advanced VMware vCloud Datacenter Services.
  
  Looking to build your own virtual datacenter? With IronCloud's VMware vCloud Datacenter, you can start building your virtual datacenter for example, with two servers and 1 Terabyte of raw (block) storage. Once you take control, you can manage everything. Install your LAMP (Linux, Apache http server, MySQL (database software) and Perl/PHP/Python) platform on one server, and your application development platform on the second server.
  
  If you start to grow or need additional servers, you can just add them on-demand using your own management interface. Even if those two servers which were originally configured with only a single core and 2GB of memory suddenly need additional CPU power and more memory, you can increase them on the fly. Go from 1 core to 4 cores on the fly. Go from 2GB memory to 16GB on the fly. Same goes for the storage. 1TB can be expanded to 4TB on the fly.
• Instead of building a private/public cloud, can I get a simple virtual machine for application development?
• Sure. Use IronCloud to build your SaaS, on our PaaS, on our IaaS. Keep in mind, this can be deployed on your own private cloud, or the IronCloud public cloud.
  
  If you only need to build a few virtual machines for your application development, and need development platforms, you can deploy your own IronCloud PaaS (Platform as a Service). All of the development tools will be hosted on your own cloud servers (public or private). Developers no longer need to install any tools on their computers. They can deploy those applications easily without any administrative skills or know-how.
  
  
• Does IronCloud offer High Availability (HA) in the event of server and operating system failures?
• That is one of the best features. Since IronCloud's public cloud is using the VMware vCloud, it offers vSphere High Availability (HA), delivering the availability needed by many applications running in virtual machines, independent of the operating system and application running in it. HA provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against hardware and operating system failures within your virtualized IT environment. Features include:
  
  - Monitors virtual machines to detect operating system and hardware failures.
  
  - Restarts virtual machines on other physical servers in the resource pool without manual intervention when server failure is detected.
  
  - Protects applications from operating system failures by automatically restarting virtual machines when an operating system failure is detected.
  
  
  
  
• We need HIPAA compliance on our private and/or public cloud. Can you help us?
• By bundling up all the hosting and platform solutions for HIPAA compliance, IronCloud offers the premier hosting environment for your HIPAA compliance needs. If you have compliance AND the best security in one platform, it makes all the difference, allowing you to focus on your patient care, instead of dealing with complicated compliance issues. We'll make HIPAA seem less like a HIPPO.
  
  IronCloud also offers full PCI DSS 2.0 compliant cloud hosting solutions.
  
  
• We have traffic from all over the country. Can you help us with high traffic hosting?
• IronCloud can provide load balancers as well as CDN (content delivery network) services as needed. Large files, such as videos, flash files, or application downloads can be sped up across multiple locations, helping you avoid bottlenecks by distributing services across a wide range of datacenters.