MaximumASP

Hosting Firm Expands Offerings, Expects to Save $166,000 in Costs in First Year

As a leading Windows®-based hosting provider, MaximumASP keeps up with the latest developments in Microsoft® technologies, recently evaluating a prerelease version of Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise. The company determined that its upcoming hosting solution—MaxESP—would benefit from several key features in the new operating system, including Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 and Application Request Routing, which is an IIS extension. With the new solution, MaximumASP will be able to more quickly provision highly available and scalable server farms and expand customers’ self-service options. Virtualization and efficient load balancing will support high-performance requirements without requiring expensive hardware. The result will be better service for hosting customers and savings for MaximumASP of up to U.S.$166,000 in the first year and ongoing savings of about $134,000 a year.

Situation

Since 2000, MaximumASP has provided Windows®-based hosting solutions supported by a staff of Microsoft-certified engineers and developers. The company is a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner and was named by Microsoft as its 2009 Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year. Based in Louisville, Kentucky, MaximumASP has 40 employees and hosts more than 50,000 domains for customers in 60 countries. The company also offers premium services, including hardware load balancing, private firewalls, security scanning, and performance monitoring.

With Application Request Routing on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve created a rock-solid platform that’s scalable to any level and takes care of all the headaches normally associated with shared hosting.  Dominic Foster Chief Technology Officer MaximumASP

Because MaximumASP develops its solutions exclusively on Microsoft infrastructure software, the company keeps up with the latest advancements in Windows Server® operating system technologies. MaximumASP has been an active participant in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program for several years, evaluating software such as Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 and other features in the Windows Server 2008 operating system before its official release. More recently, the company has tested Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and IIS 7.5. “Together with Microsoft, we identify bugs, fix issues, and help push the technologies to make them better,” says Dominic Foster, Chief Technology Officer for MaximumASP. “We have a great relationship with Microsoft. The response from the IIS team has been phenomenal.”

In addition, MaximumASP continually surveys its customers to find out what services and solutions will best meet their needs. After reviewing customer feedback, MaximumASP decided to develop a new shared-hosting platform called MaxESP—an “Elastic Shared Platform.” The idea was to create a highly scalable, cost-effective Payment Card Industry–compliant hosting solution that would make it easier for customers to manage their applications. In a shared-hosting architecture, multiple customers use the same physical server. These environments have traditionally been difficult to manage as they grow to include thousands of customers and applications, so the new solution would also make it easier for MaximumASP to support a rapidly expanding customer base.

To work most effectively, the MaxESP solution would need support at the operating system level for some of its most advanced features. The company wanted an operating system that would ease the management of Web, application, and content servers and offer high performance on existing hardware.

Solution

With Windows Server 2008 R2, MaximumASP saw an opportunity to put key new operating system features to work to serve the company’s customers better. Improvements to IIS and Application Request Routing (ARR), which is an extension for IIS, were especially interesting to the company because of the functionality these technologies would support in MaxESP and other MaximumASP offerings.

ARR is a proxy-based routing module that forwards HTTP requests to content servers based on HTTP headers, server variables, and load-balancing algorithms. As such, it is a key component that administrators can use to increase application availability and scalability, better utilize content-server resources, streamline application deployment, and control costs.

Matt Griffin, Product Manager for MaxESP at MaximumASP, says, “We like IIS 7.5 because it offers several performance enhancements over IIS 7.0, such as higher stability, more integrated extensions, and improved File Transfer Protocol [FTP] services. What most interested us about ARR was that it allows us to horizontally scale hardware while still providing high performance.”

MaximumASP has been testing Windows Server 2008 R2 and IIS 7.5 since January 2009 on Dell PowerEdge servers. It began looking at ARR in May and had a version of MaxESP available for beta testing in August. The company expects to release MaxESP publicly shortly after the official release of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Benefits

By using Windows Server 2008 R2, MaximumASP expects to enhance its service offerings. In particular, the company will take advantage of Internet Information Services 7.5 and Application Request Routing to simplify IT management, increase scalability and availability, and allow customers to handle more administrative tasks themselves. MaximumASP also expects to save up to U.S.$166,000 in labor, hardware, development, and other costs in the first year, with ongoing savings of about $134,000 annually.

To innovate new products, we have to optimize our developers’ time. Using the new Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, we’ve cut the time required for a full server rebuild from about 10 to 12 hours to just 15 minutes.  Chris Morrow Chief Information Officer MaximumASP

Simpler IT Management, High Scalability and Availability

With both its current offerings and the upcoming MaxESP, MaximumASP wants to simplify the administration of shared hosting for its IT staff. “With Application Request Routing on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve created a rock-solid platform that’s scalable to any level and takes care of all the headaches normally associated with shared hosting,” says Foster.

ARR supports shared hosting with a feature called host name affinity, which can direct requests, regardless of whether they are made from one client or many, to one server. This ensures that a given site consumes resources from only one server. The result is to help streamline the administration of Web servers, optimize performance for the client, and maximize server resources for the host.

Additionally, MaximumASP takes advantage of the ability of ARR to manage multiple server farms and to manage and monitor all configuration settings through easy-to-use tools including IIS Manager. Griffin says, “ARR sits on top of a common, or shared, configuration system provided by IIS, which makes it very easy for us to develop custom modules or apply custom provisioning that plugs into the rest of our IT pipeline. We can use this to support billing, track customers, scale up or down, or add capacity for on-demand products that we want to roll out.”

Chris Morrow, Chief Information Officer at MaximumASP, adds, “Once the operating system is installed and running, with shared configuration using IIS and ARR, we’re able to reduce the burden of having developers deal with separate configurations or separate instances of servers. To innovate new products, we have to optimize our developers’ time. Using the new Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, we’ve cut the time required for a full server rebuild from about 10 to 12 hours to just 15 minutes. In the long run, that’s going to save us a lot of labor and a lot of money.” The company estimates that the benefit of using shared configuration alone may save up to 40 labor hours a month, equivalent to $72,000 a year.

Griffin goes on to say that shared configuration further promotes savings by letting MaximumASP build a high-availability solution without having to buy or build content synchronization software. For MaximumASP to replicate this functionality, he estimates the company would need 50 labor hours up-front plus 20 hours a month to support the solution. This is equivalent to about $29,000 in the first year and $24,000 every year thereafter.

Foster explains how this high-availability approach to hosting greatly improves service. “There’s no single point of failure anymore. If a server fails, we just pull it out of the stack and put a new one in. If we need more than one, then we just run a script, apply a shared configuration, and have more computing power for the farm.”

Delegation of Administrative Tasks

In much the same way that shared configuration saves labor, delegating tasks to customers empowers them, which, in turn, reduces the IT labor burden on MaximumASP. The functionality to delegate many administrative tasks was included in IIS 7.0, and IIS 7.5 continues the trend of simplified management with enhancements to IIS Manager. Griffin says, “Previously, our IT staff had to log on as the administrator on the actual server box. Now we can put a variety of administrative tasks in the hands of the specific person who is managing only that site or application. Actions like adding host headers to a site and configuring default documents either had to be handled by our employees, or we’d have to build a custom control into our control panel to delegate the responsibility to the user. The ability to grant specific permissions to a site and let someone outside our company be the site administrator has been a huge leap forward.”

He adds, “The common platform based on ARR and IIS has made it easy for us to write Web services and interface code that put powerful management tools in customers’ hands, saving us from hiring administrative staff.”

What makes ARR so useful is that you can develop your own load-balancing scenarios: You can mix and match high-performance servers with lower cost models.  Chris Morrow Chief Information Officer MaximumASP

Hardware-Related Cost Savings

Server hardware is another area in which IIS, ARR, and the MaxESP platform based on these technologies will contribute to the company’s cost savings. “What makes ARR so useful is that you can develop your own load-balancing scenarios: You can mix and match high-performance servers with lower cost models,” says Morrow. “ARR queries all these servers and sends traffic to the ones that aren’t busy. By combining this capability with shared configuration and storage area network devices on the back end, the result is a powerful and flexible platform that would not have been possible a year ago—and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional platform.”

Additional hardware savings will come from using Hyper-V™ virtualization technology in Windows Server 2008 R2. Although MaxESP is not built on Hyper-V, many of its supporting features run on virtualized Hyper-V instances, such as its logging utility, cache accelerators, and e-mail server. Griffin says, “With Hyper-V fully deployed, we expect consolidation ratios of anywhere from 5:1 to 30:1, depending on the application and the age and capacity of the server.” Similarly Live Migration—which administrators can use to move virtual machines from one Hyper-V physical host to another, without any disruption of service—will also help cut hardware costs. Foster says, “Live Migration is huge for us because our customers don’t want their servers to be down ever. Now we can slide virtual servers from one machine to another and turn off physical servers that aren’t needed, further reducing costs.”

Griffin calculates that the equipment savings due to ARR and Hyper-V will include the following: $25,000 initially through consolidation and the use of less expensive servers ($18,000 annually thereafter); $20,000 through the efficient load- balancing features of ARR that permit reusing lower tier load-balancing hardware (one-time savings); $5,000 in annual power costs; and $15,000 a year in data center costs.

Combined with the savings of $72,000 from shared configuration and $29,000 in software development and support costs, the total savings to MaximumASP will be about $166,000 in the first year alone. Thereafter, annual savings will be about $134,000.

Extensible Functionality, Faster Performance

The extensibility of IIS is important to MaximumASP as the company customizes services for particular customers. Many of the extensions created for IIS 7.0 are now shipped as part of Windows Server 2008 R2, and new extensions continue to be made available for both versions. Organizations can also develop and add their own. Griffin says, “With IIS 7.5, if there’s a cool, fun, or useful capability that you want to expose to your customers, you can write an extension for it. Microsoft has clearly made extensibility a priority in IIS 7.5.”

Additionally, with improved FTP services and WebDAV, MaximumASP customers will have more flexible and secure options for distributing confidential or other sensitive content. WebDAV is one of the previously optional IIS extensions now included with IIS 7.5 for publishing content easily and more securely to IIS Web servers.

Also, the overall performance of Windows Server 2008 R2 gives MaximumASP the extra computing capacity it needs to increase the scalability and functionality of its solutions. Morrow says, “With Windows Server 2008 R2, we’re seeing several enhancements that make adopting the operating system an essential strategy. Important ones are faster system performance and higher network throughput, and with faster performance, we’re getting more value from our commodity hardware.”

Solid Foundation for Future Enhancements

With the success it had using Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS 7.5—and especially ARR—to create its MaxESP solution, MaximumASP is looking forward to the upcoming ARR 2.0 to support new capabilities. ARR 2.0 builds on ARR 1.0 with features for disk-based caching, expanded cache management, large-content caching (needed for movie clips, for example), and using ARR as a proxy node in content delivery network environments. Additionally, ARR 2.0 works with the Live Smooth Streaming extension for IIS to support live-content requests without overloading the live-streaming server. Foster says, “We have customers who will be very interested in the caching and streaming capabilities of ARR 2.0 in the near future. However, right now, we’re just at the beginning of putting ARR technology to use with exciting, labor-saving, service-enhancing applications like MaxESP.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about MaximumASP products and services, call (502) 899-3220 or visit the Web site at:
www.maximumasp.com

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. With Windows Server 2008 R2, you can create solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than with previous versions of Windows Server. Building on the features, security, reliability, and performance provided by Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 extends connectivity and control to local and remote resources. This means that your organization can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies gained through enhanced management and control over resources across the enterprise

For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2008R2

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2009