IaaS Providers Help Small to Mid Sized Companies Control IT Infrastructure Costs

Posted on May 14, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Contributed by Michael Ray, Solutions Architect at VAZATA

IaaS Providers Help Keep Down IT Infrastructure Costs

IaaS providers offer cutting edge IT infrastructure and expertise - let your business invest in what it does best.

The small to medium sized companies who have business critical applications that require little to no downtime benefit most by using IaaS. These applications are essential to the company’s survival, with every moment of downtime resulting in lost revenue. The problem is, however, that it requires a very large amount of capital outlay in order to build such a robust internal infrastructure to meet the needs of only a few, critical servers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers bridge that gap by building the robust infrastructure and selling it at a fraction of the cost, making the IT infrastructure an operational expense for the company. As a result, depreciating hardware, periodic tech refresh, expensive engineering costs and constant downtime are no longer an issue.

VAZATA Offers Most Robust Cabinet on the Market for $999

Posted on May 9, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Free Virtual Server with Managed Cabinet

The most robust cabinet on the market at only $999 a month

Dallas, Texas – May 9, 2012 – VAZATA, a leading provider of complex managed hosting, colocation and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), announced today the launch of The VAZATA Cabinet, a fully loaded solution that establishes a new benchmark at a monthly $999 price point.

Lance Black, CEO of VAZATA, commented, “we wanted to make a compelling offer to the market – we’ve bundled a fully managed cabinet with a free virtual server, 500GBs of managed storage and comprehensive help desk and on-site support services for a monthly price that makes incredible financial sense. We set the customer up with power and network inside a locked cabinet that resides in our Tier III, SSAE 16 Type 2 and FISMA compliant data centers, and we completely support the solution while the customer maintains control over everything else.”

The VAZATA Cabinet includes a 42U locking cabinet, redundant power feeds (power strips included), bandwidth (multi-carrier blend, 100Mbs port and no commit) and 24/7 help desk support. Also included are a 24 port managed Ethernet switch, managed firewall services, a virtual server (1vCPU, 4GB RAM, OS) and 500GBs of managed storage provided through VAZATA’s vStructure™ platform.

Mr. Black added, “not only does this product offering beat the market for high quality cabinets, but it also provides our customers with a clear, easy path for cloud infrastructure utilization supporting functions like mission critical applications production, disaster recovery, storage and test/dev environments. By bundling The VAZATA Cabinet with a free virtual server, we’re staying true to our mission to simplify the migration path from colo to the cloud.”

To learn more or request a sales brochure, contact VAZATA.com.

Comparing PaaS to IaaS: IT Scalability and Cost Considerations

Posted on May 7, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Contributed by Michael Ray, Solutions Architect for VAZATA.

Saas, PaaS, and IaaS

IaaS is a hosted data storage solution, in which the cloud provider offers base hardware and computing resources, such as virtual machines, servers, storage and network equipment. Operating systems and applications—which are maintained by the client—can then be laid on top of, and run through, the provider’s equipment.

One of the primary benefits of IaaS is the ability to scale resources on demand—meeting capacity growth without the needed time, cost and energy of setting up a new, physical IT environment.

Pete Benoit, VP of Technical Solutions at VAZATA, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider serving Global 1000 businesses, U.S. Federal Government Agencies and Mid-Market Enterprises has this to say on the subject:

“From my point of view, there are very straight forward reasons to choose PaaS over IaaS in certain cases. The reasoning follows the same logic as any decision to outsource or use a service provider. A company would choose to extend its relationship to this layer to gain the expertise held by the provider or lessen the internal support requirements for running the application. This could translate into cost savings and, possibly a more efficient method to run the application. I should point out that a PaaS relationship would split the application responsibilities between the top line application team and a service provider. Depending on the circumstance, this split could be beneficial, in a best case scenario, or cause inefficiencies in the deployment and maintenance of the service on the other hand. This is a potential issue that should be thoroughly considered and mapped out during the selection process.”

How To Manage Going to The Cloud

Posted on April 30, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Contributed by Michael Ray, Solutions Architect for VAZATA.

Transitioning to the Cloud

For all the benefits that Cloud offers, it still represents change — and there are inevitable cultural issues when you ask people to change how they do things like going to the cloud. To help the transition along, lay some groundwork so people will understand how much it can help their work.

Here are some ideas:

Get executive support – Getting one of the company executive to get behind the switch will move things along much more quickly and people will tend to listen.

Understand the culture – Cultures that have doing things the same way for the last 12 years tend to be more resistant, so roll out your plan for going to the cloud accordingly.

Communicate the message – Let people know what to expect, especially those who are most affected by the change. Meetings, memos, social networks or whatever works best for your organization. Just get the word out.
It’s important to explain the change directly to those whose jobs will be impacted.

Educate the troops — Everyone in the organization who’s involved with cloud needs to understand three things:
- Why the company is moving some operations to the cloud model
- What the benefits of the move will be for the organization
- How individual people will be impacted by the move to cloud

It’s also a good idea to have a formal statement about the reasons your business is going to the cloud, in case you have to really convince your staff.

Get people involved — When people feel they’re part of something, they get more interested. Appoint informed people to lead

Train your staff — Even if you’re just moving to a virtualized cloud desktop, you may still need to do some training. Of course, the type of training will depend on the job function. Training will be required if:
- You’re moving a lot of the workload to the cloud
- Your staff needs to use the cloud provider’s monitoring tools
- There are processes that will change as a result of the move
- You move to a SaaS model for some of your applications

Key Considerations When Moving to the Cloud

Posted on April 17, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Moving to the Cloud: Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

Know What to Look for in Cloud Hosting Data Centers

Submitted by Michael Ray, Solutions Architect for VAZATA.

With all the vast new options that Cloud services introduced in 2011, flexibility and scalability were two areas abuzz with conversation. The fact is operations teams must remain as diligent in designing Cloud architectures as they would a traditional approach. It can be dangerously easy think of the basic reliability issues as ‘somebody’s problem other than yours’, but the fact is, you need to ask the same questions about reliability and scalability that you would ask a traditional provider.

Planning

Determine the expectations for your infrastructure first. Get input from your colleagues and make it a well thought-out collaborative effort.

Which Web applications are mission critical and require 100% uptime?
Are there back-end applications that can be down for a few days in the event of a disaster?
What are the costs of downtime or data loss?

Provider

With your objectives in mind, you can now start looking at providers. Start with a wide selection and narrow it down – five is good to start. For all but the simplest projects, make sure to start with a conversation with someone in person. Discuss initial pricing at this stage so you have a better idea of the market.

Locations

The first step in determining location must be based on answers to the following questions:

Does your application require certain latency or performance guarantees that will be impacted by network placement?
Does the facility meet Tier 3 or Tier 4 standards as set by the Uptime Institute?

If all of your users or visitors are in Seattle, it probably doesn’t make sense to put your datacenter in Miami. Applications requiring 100% uptime must be hosted at more than one location, and subsequent locations must be geographically diverse. If your application requires 100% uptime, you should take your analysis of locations one step further.

Are there any predictable events that could impact multiple locations?

The best news is with Cloud the backup capacity is economical. You may have only a few servers—or none at all—running in the backup datacenter, with the ability to spin up more in case of an event. Ask providers what they recommend for disaster recovery. Then make an informed decision.

Network

Network connectivity is vital. Questions to pose may include:

Is the provider connected to multiple “Tier 1” Internet providers?
What steps does the provider take to ensure that there aren’t single points of failure in their network access?

Data and Monitoring

By now, you should have a good idea of the questions you need to ask to ensure your Cloud provider is the one for you. But one more question goes back to the planning stage. Do you have a documented, regularly tested process for failovers?

Where is your data stored?
Is your critical data still accessible if your primary datacenter goes down?
How long will it take to transition to the DR Datacenter – and can that time be improved?

On the subject of monitoring – ask these questions:

How will you know if a critical service is offline? If you don’t find out about an outage until you arrive at work on Monday morning, all of your disaster recovery plans will be compromised.
Are all critical systems monitored?
Do the people getting the monitoring alert have a documented way to engage the disaster recovery process and communicate the status?
Do all critical personnel have contact information and details of processes?

The Cloud is perfect for companies looking to deploy scalability and reliability for websites and web applications. Just be sure to plan well and avoid becoming a media statistic, losing customers and customer confidence as a result. Think ahead, make it a team effort and most of all, ask the right questions right from the start.

Virtualization of your Data Center for Cloud Hosting

Posted on April 10, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Contributed by Michael Ray, Solutions Architect for VAZATA.

As you construct the plans for your cloud environment, perhaps the most important issue on your checklist should be your ‘data center server virtualization’. Here’s a helpful list to hit the high points:

Checklist for building a data center for cloud hosting

Security is not the only aspect to be considered as you build a data center for cloud hosting. Important, yes, but setting up your data center server is an important, complex task. Consider these key points:

• Performance
• Data Center Server Virtualization
• Security
• Interoperability

Let’s look at each one a little closer.

Security – Your secure data is a gold mine, and with hackers so prevalent these days, preventing access to your data is a major concern. Because you should not let other customers on the cloud, a cloud authentication service is a reliable way to better insure security. It prevents the possibility of other cloud sub-sites getting hacked if one of them gets compromised. Also, it’s imperative that you’re sure only the right user is accessing resources in case there are multiple clouds. Simply put, you must be sure that if any sub-site gets compromised, it will not impact the other sub-sites/sites in the cloud.

Data Center Server Virtualization – There are plenty of data center server virtualization platforms with VMware being one of the most preferred custom virtualization platforms because it allows multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. Data center performance monitoring is important and server management can be greatly simplified with the help of virtualization. Disaster recovery planning is enhanced with virtualization in data center operations.

Interoperability – Part of your security process should include making sure your cloud hosting vendor sends out alerts for risk and fidelity. If you can consolidate monitoring, and management systems, then less difference exists between the cloud environment and the internal IT infrastructural set-up, ensuring greater levels of interoperability. Try to analyze the services that can be used commonly in both your cloud and network environment. It is up to you to ensure the compatibility of resources with those provided by the cloud, keeping them available to your users at all times.

Performance – Performance is the ultimate benchmark for cloud hosting and you must maintain the optimal performance levels to reduce any significant latencies that may appear when users try to carry out tasks that require extensive resources. It’s important to know how much bandwidth your cloud vendor provides, what their general access time is, as well as how regional failures are handled. The flexibility offered with the cloud environment is extensive, and developing the most sustainable business model while building your data center for cloud hosting will come together more smoothly keeping these key points in mind each step of the way.

A few thoughts about customer service from Lance Black, CEO

Posted on April 6, 2012 by VAZATA Information

Hello friends! We live in a rapidly evolving industry and sadly, in this day and age, words like “partnership” and “customer service” have been hijacked, to a certain degree, and become diluted in their meaning.How many times do you hear a technology provider say, “we view our customer relationships as partnerships?” Or how about, “customer service is paramount.” Yet how often do you, the customer, believe any real truth in these kinds of promises?I’m very disappointed by this because at VAZATA, we do what we say we’re going to do. It sounds like an oversimplified promise but it’s a rarity in an industry like ours where Telco giants and small regional players are both competing for your business. Both say that you aren’t going to be treated like a number, that your account will receive ample attention…and more often than not, both fall short in delivery.

Yes, we’re a “vendor” to our customers and yes, they pay us to do a job and to do it well. But I do like to also use the word “partner” when I talk about our relationships with the companies we serve because we act like a true partner in how we approach our customer engagements. We can do what we’re told, but we like to go a step further and proactively propose new ideas and new ways to apply a solution so we can create more customer benefit than “just a vendor” would deliver. We also believe that in most cases, all qualifications being equal, people choose us over our competition because we’ve managed to build a real relationship. I don’t care how meticulous procurement departments are, or how detailed a request for proposal is. At the end of the day, relationships count. Relationships are what get you through the complexities of a deployment. Relationships are what carry you forward during times of change or growth. Relationships are far more valuable than transactions.

Additionally, customer service is the only leg we have to stand on when we’re being considered against a fully adept competitor that has much of the same infrastructure that we have. Sure, we have competitive advantages and don’t get me wrong, we’re very proud of them. But I don’t believe they are enough to win us a deal on their own. We win deals because in addition to having notable attributes that make us special or different, we don’t underestimate the importance of customer service. It defines the quality of our company.

If you pick up the phone, you’ll speak to someone right away – you’ll speak with a VAZATA employee based here, physically present in our building, complete with expertise and knowledge of your account. You won’t wait on hold listening to elevator music from the 1970s for fifteen minutes, and you won’t be treated like a number. Your phone call presents us with an opportunity to demonstrate exactly what we mean when we talk about VAZATA Customer Care.

A while ago, I asked my marketing team to find a way to communicate our promises when it comes to partnership and customer service, but without using those exact words. I explained that my concern is that the meaning has become diluted. After spinning their wheels for a bit, they basically came back to me and said, “it doesn’t matter what we say. It matters what they say.” By “they,” they are referring to our customers (YOU!). They’re right. The words we use are irrelevant. So be sure to check out our case studies and feel free to ask us for customer references, should you go down the path of considering VAZATA as a strategic partner. We’re very proud of the words our customers use to describe our capabilities and the quality of our solutions.

Please feel free to contact me should you have any feedback on your experience with VAZATA or should you have any questions. I am always accessible to you. My direct e-mail address is below.

Kind regards,
Lance Black
lblack@vazata.com

Could Personal Cloud Really Replace the PC?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by VAZATA Admin

Contributed by: Michael Ray, Solutions Architect for VAZATA

According to industry experts, in the near future, devices themselves will become less important, and a combination of devices, including the PC, will be one of many options. No one device will be the primary driver, but rather the personal cloud will be the star in that role. The focus will be on access to the cloud and the content stored or shared on the cloud.

Megatrend No. 1: Consumerization

Users are more technologically-savvy with a variety of expectations of technology.
The internet and social media have enabled users to venture out.
The rise of powerful mobile devices is a game changer for users.
Users have become more creative and inventive.
Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have access to similar technology.

Megatrend No. 2: Virtualization

Virtualization has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can implement client environments.

Megatrend No. 3: “App-ification”

Applications are designed, delivered and consumed by users in multiple ways. This change has a dramatic impact on the entire market.

Megatrend No. 4: The Self-Service Cloud

The advent of the cloud for servicing individual users opens a whole new level of opportunity. Every user can now have scalable and nearly infinite resources for whatever they need.

Megatrend No. 5: The Mobility Shift
Today, mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices.

These megatrends are creating a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in creative new ways to enhance many areas of their work and personal lives. By 2014, who can say for sure? But, the indicators are very strong that the impact of the cloud will be felt at home, work and around the world.

Source: www.gartner.com