SOLUTION HOSTING

As a mission-critical component of your Agency’s operations, Project Development services including construction management, contractor bid submission and agency electronic bidding are required to be highly available and reliable.  To provide the highest level of availability, stability and business continuity, ExeVision uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to host the integrated Project Development (iPDWeb) solution.

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Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of managed data centers. It provides both PaaS and IaaS services and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

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Microsoft uses a specialized operating system, called Azure to run its "fabric layer" — a cluster hosted at Microsoft's data centers that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Azure. The service has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services. Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Azure Fabric Controller so the services and environment do not become unavailable or unstable if one of the servers crashes within the data center.

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Additional benefits of the Azure hosting environment are the stability of a unique set of resources dedicated to each customer and the ability to manage the environment on-the-fly for adjustments to components including the number of servers, load balancing, memory and processing requirements, with the ability to create rules-based environment modifications based on resource consumption.  And Azure offers enhanced speed and communications by providing the ability for the location of the servers to be specified for a reduction in latency.