IT organizations today are under immense pressure to cut costs while also increasing efficiency. While economic conditions demand increased scrutiny and financial analysis for all IT decisions, business growth demands the ability to introduce new business models and services quickly.
Faced with this apparent paradox, more and more organizations are looking to managed hosting services for solutions that satisfy both of those requirements. Managed hosting allows the creation of operational, cost and energy efficiency without the need to invest in additional technology, people and expertise.
“More and more customers are looking at FusionStorm’s managed hosting solution as a way of reducing operational costs, improving time to market, improving the availability and performance of their applications, and improving the flexibility of their IT services,” said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm. “At the same time, this is a ‘green’ solution because we’re able to take advantage of economies of scale that reduce power consumption both globally and for each individual customer.”
Shifting the Burden
Today, IT spending is heavily weighted with fixed costs. Almost two-thirds of the average IT budget is fixed, at least in the short run. These fixed-cost models burden organizations with an overabundance of assets and large amounts of depreciation, making the business less responsive. With technology refresh cycles shrinking to three years or less, organizations need a more flexible acquisition model that diminishes the need for large capital expenditures.
By shifting the capital expense and maintenance of IT assets to FusionStorm, customers can take advantage of economies of scale to gain access to the hardware, applications, bandwidth and skill sets they need. Best of all, FusionStorm customers reap the cost-saving benefits of managed hosting while leveraging the best-of-breed technologies and best practices of FusionStorm’s world-class data centers.
“We’ve laid the groundwork so the customer doesn’t have to go out and reinvent the wheel. That means we can do it faster because the underlying infrastructure is already built and we use standardized processes around the deployment of custom solutions,” Conroy said. “It can take the typical organizations months to order hardware and network gear, get the cabling in place — all the things you have to do to roll out a new environment. We can typically deploy a complete hosted environment in anywhere from a few days to six weeks. Plus customers can take advantage of our data center IT infrastructure and skill sets at a much lower cost than doing it themselves.”
FusionStorm’s managed hosting customers also gain the flexibility to rapidly scale up operations to cope with peaks of demand, without the need to carry that overhead during more quiet periods.
“You can grow and shrink the environment based upon the needs of your organization,” said Conroy. “Actually, 94 percent of our managed hosting customers have grown their environment in the first year because we can do it rapidly with little or no downtime. That includes adding servers, storage, security features, disaster recovery, offsite backup — it’s all part of the mix. We’re also doing more and more of our hosting in our virtual infrastructure, which gives us even more flexibility in how we deploy the environment for the customer.”
At Your Service
The typical managed hosting environment involves the use of dedicated servers with standard configurations owned and managed by the service provider. Standard operating systems, network management and monitoring tools are employed to maximize efficiency and enable the incremental addition of resources at the customer’s request.
Typically, the service provider will establish a baseline level of service and offer additional services optionally, such as server load balancing, virtual private networking and other features. Service providers can offer as much technical expertise as necessary or as stipulated in the service contract — managing not only hardware and connectivity, but also software issues including platform administration, database management and applications.
FusionStorm takes the concept to the next level.
“We can keep environments up and running at a higher level of availability and performance because we’re leveraging our best practices around deployment, monitoring, management, server clustering and load balancing. To go with that we provide industry-leading SLAs with uptime guarantees that are measured not just at the component level but at the application level. And our SLAs have financial payback — customers can hold us accountable to an SLA when oftentimes they’re not able to do that with their own IT department,” said Conroy.
“We can host applications that run on Windows, Linux and multiple flavors of Unix. We support Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL as well as some other databases, and a wide variety of application platforms including Microsoft .Net, Java, and various open-source solutions. We offer hosting for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint as turnkey applications. We also host the Oracle eBusiness suite and other ERP and CRM systems.”
Beyond the Basics
Although the promise of significant cost reduction through lower infrastructure and labor expenses is a compelling reason to consider a hosted solution, there are other advantages. FusionStorm delivers a wide range of features such as archiving, compliance, security and data replication to make its hosted offerings even more attractive.
“For example, we offer three tiers of storage, each with different costs based on performance levels,” Conroy said. “The first tier is high-performance, enterprise-class storage. There’s a mid tier for medium-level performance, and there’s a very low-cost tier for backup and archival. The customer doesn’t have to go buy three classes of storage — it’s all built into our infrastructure and we can specify the exact type of storage they need when we spec out the environment and scale it as their needs change.”
Through the use of virtualization and replication technologies, FusionStorm can also deliver cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. Depending upon the customer’s needs, FusionStorm can implement a DR site using physical or virtual servers and a dedicated storage array or shared utility storage. FusionStorm can also provide monitoring and problem resolution for the communication circuit linking the primary and DR sites, and perform ongoing testing of the recovery process.
“We can be the customer’s production site, DR site or both because we have multiple data centers,” said Conroy. “Our enterprise-class data centers have 24x7 secured access and are fully fault tolerant, with multiple generators and power distribution systems internally.”
The benefits of using a managed hosting service provider over building a traditional in-house data center are many, but they all boil down to better allocation of resources. From the major time and expertise outlays required to procure hardware to the constant struggle of hiring and retaining qualified IT personnel, outsourcing at least part of the data center is a smart move.
“The main reason people look to us, especially in economic downturn times, is they still need to drive top-line revenue,” said Conroy. “Our managed hosting service gives customers a way of moving forward with their initiatives as an OPEX budget expense rather than a large capital expense and without hiring new staff. We are able to provide significant savings compared to internal hosting that can range from 35 percent to 100 percent or more.”