Best Practices for IaaS with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers Lowell Anderson, Director, Product Marketing, IAAS, Parallels
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• Worlds Leading Cloud Virtualization Solution
- 1,000,000+ containers
- 1,500+ Cloud Providers
- 150 new Service Providers in 2011
Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
Virtual Private Server Market Share
Profit from the Cloud TM
Best practices enable success for VPS Hosting
Increase ARPU
Reduce Customer Churn
Pursue Operational Excellence
Optimize Density
Cross-Sell /
Up-Sell
Drive Loyalty,
Stickiness With
Differentiated
Products
Ensure Reliability,
Stability &
Performance
Minimize
Infrastructure Cost
per VPS
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Key to success: ARPU
Increase ARPU through cross-sell/up-sell
Metric Hosted Infrastructure
ARPU • VPS: $30 - $50
$-
$10
$20
$30
$40
$50
$60
High Margin Low Margin
ARPU
Profit @ $30/VPS = $5
Profit @ $50/VPS = $21
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• Maximize $$ at POS - Package Add-Ons like Plesk
- Maximize RAM, Storage and BW
• Proactively Up-Sell - Monitor server usage and
offer upsize packages
- Upsell Plesk licenses or additional servers as they approach domain limits
Key to success: ARPU
Increase ARPU through cross-sell/up-sell
Add-Ons
• Plesk
• Backup
• Monitoring
• Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam
• Development Bundles
Best
Practice
Make it easy to
upsell and size
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Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
Metric Hosted Infrastructure
Churn • VPS/unmanaged offerings:
2.5-4% per mo
Best
Performer
Needs
Improvement
-60%
Performance gap in churn rate for SMB Cloud providers
Annual churn rate, Index 100 for best performer
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• Increase Attach Rate - Drive stickiness through freebies,
personalization, special offers
Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
Special
offers
Success through free and
limited versions – 10% increase
in adoption with little efforts!
Freebies
Increase customer retention by
bundling Plesk panel on their virtual
server offerings
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• Offer branded bundles and niche offerings for target customer segments
Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
Branded
bundles Target Customer
Segments
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• Use “Cloud” marketing
Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
Make it “cloudy” with dynamic content
and toggles enabling customers to
personalize and tailor their own packages
Use the unique features of PVC to
position as “Cloud Services”
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• Be Unique
Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
Leverage unique features of PVC
to introduce new pricing models,
customer orientation and go-to-
market approaches
Charging customers different
prices through “Stackable”
containers – a new differentiated
offering for customers
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• Identify and nurture - Use Social media (Twitter,
Facebook) for real-time customer dialogue and engagement
Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
• 80% leverage Twitter for
real-time updates
• 90% maintain a Facebook page
for dialogue and testimonials
• 75% spend less than $5K annually
on marketing, increasing their
usage of social media Low High
$25,000 $0
Recent Service Provider Voice-of-Customer initiative
$1,500
Average
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Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn • Compete on service and support, not just price
- Showcase how you are different.
- Look at opportunities to create
affinity with customers through
through shared values, interests Customer Service &
Support as
key competitive
advantages
80% of Service Providers
claim they differentiate on
quality of service and customer
support – you need to develop
your niche!
Share accolades
and testimonials
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Key to success: reduce customer churn
Reduce Customer Churn
Customer forums
and peer-to-peer
support enablement
Rewards for longer-
term purchases or
service contracts
• Build customer loyalty • Customer community
• Customer forums
• Rewards programs
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Pursue Operational Excellence
Key to success: operational excellence
• Disk Recommendations - 4x500GB RAID10
- Select swapspace relative to memory
- “Hotplug compatible“ disk bays and RAID controllers
- Avoid fans on controllers
- Use battery backup controllers
Memory Swap
0 – 4 GB 2 GB
4 – 16 GB 4 GB
16 – 64 GB 8 GB
64 – 256 GB 16 GB
256 – 512 GB 32 GB
Best
Practices
• Optimize Your Environment - Use compatible native environment
on the host: (RHEL6 for vz4.7)
- Be consistent with HW on nodes to reduce risk of driver-related problems.
- Don’t use 3rd-party drivers on nodes
- Keep configurations synchronized across all the PVC servers.
- Test new hardware before production switch-over
• Streamline deployment - Use PSBM to streamline
deployment
- Use PXE boot to automate network-based installation
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Take advantage of latest PVC 4.7 features
• CPU Limits - Ensure that CPU core number and
limits are set according to your hardware environment
• Disk I/O Limits - Prevent situations where high disk
I/O activities in one container will slow down the performance of other containers
- Set to 75% max disk throughput
• vSwap - Limits the maximum amount of
allocated memory by specifying physical memory and virtual swap space which can be used by a container
Key to success: density
Optimize Density
Match Your Server to Your Business Model
Workload CPU Memory Density
Web
Applications/Plesk
2x
Quad-
core
64GB 80-100
Database/Compute
Intensive
2x
Eight-
Core
128GB` 80-100
Low High
200+ 10
Recent Service Provider Voice-of-Customer initiative
90
Average
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Profit From The Cloud
Best
Practices
Increase ARPU Make it easy for customer to purchase add-ons and
position your most profitable packages to maximize
$$ at POS
Reduce Customer Churn Know your customer – start a customer loyalty
program today
Pursue Operational Excellence Streamline your installation process and optimize
your environment using PSBM to deploy PVC
Optimize Density
Take advantage of the latest PVC features to
maximize density and improve performance