Over the last few months, there has been an increasing amount of coverage on cloud computing. Just last week, Infoworld run an interesting blog on the traction cloud computing has been gaining recently. Based on the developments outlined in this post, it seems like Red Hat is becoming increasingly serious on software appliances, virtualization and cloud computing – all areas in which we at Nixu Software have been active for good two years now. This of course is no wonder, as I’m sure the good people of Red Hat understand the great promise of these emerging technologies.

As far as DNS and DHCP services and geographically distributed enterprise networks are concerned, cloud computing and/or hosted virtual computing environments present these organizations with some rather interesting opportunities. Traditionally, to escape the complexities associated with running basic DNS/DHCP services in branch offices, there organizations have deployed hardware-based appliances on remote sites. However, now that there is an increasing number of service providers out there hosting virtual machines for a relatively low monthly fee, it actually might make sense to investigate the possibility of running DNS and DHCP services as virtual machines connected to the branch office over a VLAN (virtual LAN) network.

As far as I can see, this makes sense in two ways:

1. Reduction of maintenance and management overhead: as proper software appliances run on hosted virtual platforms can be managed over a secure, web-based user-interface and as their maintenance processes (sw upgrades) are automated, the DNS and DHCP servers running as virtual machines can be managed remotely from the central data centre location. Better yet, as the hosting service provider looks after the virtual computing environment against a low monthly fee, the corporate IT function no longer needs to look after the server platforms (which they have to do with traditional hardware-based appliances).
2. Reduction of operating costs: as DNS and DHCP services are not very CPU, memory or bandwidth-intensive applications, the cost of running these as hosted virtual machines is actually quite low. This is simply because most pricing models used by hosting service providers (as far as virtual computing environments is concerned) is the combination of CPU, memory and bandwidth usage. As DNS and DHCP servers consume very little of these scarce resources – and especially so in branch offices – the mothly cost of running a virtualized DNS and/or DHCP server can be as low as just $50 per month.

If you’d like to give this approach a go, there’s a two-step approach you can use to see what this would be like. The first step is to go to Nixu Software’s website and download our virtualization-ready software appliances for free 30-day evaluation (you can do the evaluation on VMware or Citrix Xen so you don’t need physical hardware for the evaluation). If you like what you see, you can then ask the hosting service provider of your choice to run our software appliances on their hosted virtual platform as “private” VMs that connect to your branch office(s) over VLAN.