Virtual Computing, Storage and Security for Latin America

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and managed hosting have experienced rapid adoption by enterprise users in North America and Europe. Level 3 Communications is now offering a new set of data center services to enterprises in Latin America.

The countries of Latin America span North America (Mexico), Central America, the Caribbean and the continent of South America. This is an area of over 8 million square miles and 14% of the land surface of the globe that’s home to a population of almost 600 million. It’s also a region where major economic sectors include, banking, agriculture, manufacturing, commodities and tourism.

Level 3 Communications has a major commitment in Latin America, with operations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, the United States (Florida) and the Caribbean region. They already have 15 world-class data centers located in the main business centers of Latin America. The connectivity is in place to support communications in-country, between countries and to the rest of the global community. Options include SDH Private Line, Wavelengths and Ethernet Wavelengths, Ethernet Transport, IP VPN, high speed Internet Protocol and more.

What’s exciting now is the opportunity for virtualized services in the cloud to replace local data center operations. Cloud computing, storage and security have the advantages of being quickly scaled, and paid for as an operating rather than capital expense.

Level 3 Dynamic Enterprise Computing offers virtual computing, storage and security elements with dynamic pricing based on resource consumption. Resource availability is assured, but not limited. You can rapidly scale, or burst, to cover unforeseen business activities. All the while, you are paying for what you actually use, rather than having to provision resources that may sit idle just to ensure that you have enough online to keep up with demand peaks.

Level 3 is a major force in cloud computing with the advantage of also being a major worldwide telecom carrier. You have a choice of public, private or hybrid cloud arrangements. You also have the connectivity you need. You can connect to the public cloud through Level 3’s core Internet backbone. For a private cloud, Level 3 offers MPLS, private line and wavelength connections.

One thing you might want to consider is converging your network to support both voice and data. This has the advantage of eliminating the redundant telephone network, but the options it opens up go far beyond simple wiring. Once you’ve substituted IP phones for the analog desk sets you have now, your voice communications will all take place over your local network and the WAN connections you have in place with branch offices and other remote business locations. This lets you bypass the telephone industry toll charges for interoffice calls.

The biggest change of all comes when you abandon the large and expensive in-house PBX telephone system in favor of a hosted PBX solution in the cloud. It works like a virtual server, only for voice communications. The service provider takes care of trunk lines to the public telephone system. All other calls stay on-net. You also have the option of integrating your smartphones and other mobile devices into a unified communications system. You’ll have the same services available in the field as you do in the office.

Do you do business in Latin America, North America or elsewhere in the world and need the high performance connectivity and data center services that help make an enterprise successful? If so, have a look at the suites of cloud computing and networking services available from Level 3 Communications and other top rate service providers.



Note: Map of Latin America image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

10 Mbps Up and Down

Have you heard that 10 Mbps is the new 1 Mbps? I've heard it said that 10 Mbps is the new T1. Those statements are pretty close, since T1 speed is 1.5 Mbps. Either way, there’s a move afoot to higher bandwidth levels and it should come as no surprise that 10 Mbps is becoming the new benchmark for SMB business bandwidth. Let’s see why.

T1 bandwidth established itself in the last couple of decades as the telephone industry made this digital technology available to businesses not related to telecom. One big impetus was the rise of the Internet. When the Internet opened up to business in the 90’s companies of all size suddenly got interested in getting online. That meant web servers, email and broadband connections. T1 lines were reasonably speedy for the time and readily available over twisted pair connections.

A lot has happened since the turn of the century. We still use web servers and email, but web pages have grown tremendously and much of the content is now audio, video and interactive. Commerce has moved online. Brochure pages have become full-fledged retail stores. Companies with both online and bricks & mortar operations may have common inventories that are managed in the cloud.

As you may well realize, the bandwidth of yore won’t cut it for today’s applications. Sure, a generation ago a T1 line could be shared by dozens of employees who thought they found the holy grail of high speed connections compared with the dial-up they were used to at home. Nowadays, 6 to 10 Mbps is considered about average for residential broadband. Some users are inclined to pay up for 2x or 3x that amount in order to support their insatiable video habit. You may not be sanctioning long periods of video watching at work, but you still need line speed to keep up productivity.

Look at what’s happening right now. Businesses large and small are relocating to the cloud. Data centers are going dark, as servers are moving to colo facilities and being sold off in favor of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). PBX systems are meeting a similar fate. The telephone closet is emptying out as companies go with hosted communications. What’s left is a phone on every desk plugged into the LAN along with a PC. These are augmented by smartphones and tablets. All that IT infrastructure is gone.

Well, it’s not really gone. It’s just located somewhere else and likely part of virtualized shared resources. What companies may forget in their zeal to gain the economic benefits of the cloud is that connectivity is now a choke point. The problems of running out of LAN bandwidth were solved so long ago that everyone takes lack of network congestion for granted. The memories of moving up from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and perhaps 1000 Mbps have become fuzzy and faded. Surprise! Those growing pains are being revisited in the form of connections to the cloud.

The bulk of traffic is now flowing back and forth to the cloud for companies that moved to hosted solutions. What that boils down to is that you need LAN quality connections to the WAN. Clearly T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps aren’t up to that. This is where 10 Mbps makes a lot more sense as a baseline. Don’t get too comfortable with that number. It’s going to be 100 Mbps before you know it.

For the moment, let’s take 10 Mbps as a baseline connection requirement. How do we get that without breaking the bank? There are a couple of easy growth paths that will give you 10 Mbps in both directions. That’s important with cloud services because you have data flowing both up and down. Your T1 line is symmetrical like that. It’s 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Wouldn’t it make sense to simply hot rod a T1 line to get more speed?

Don’t laugh. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. You can’t jack up the speed of a single T1 line or it won’t be a T1 line anymore. In fact, it won’t run at all. T1 is a synchronized service that runs at 1.5 Mbps or shuts down. However, there is no reason you can’t run 2 T1 lines and combine their bandwidth. That process is called bonding. Bond 7 T1 lines together and you get 10.5 Mbps. Exactly what you need and a little more.

Another service that will get you to 10 x 10 Mbps bandwidth quite easily is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service runs on twisted pair telco cable, just like T1, so there is little or no construction cost involved in an upgrade. The modulation scheme is newer and trades distance for speed. That means that within a few miles of the telco central office you can easily get 10 Mbps and perhaps 20 or 30 Mbps over copper. Closer in that figure rises to DS3 levels of 45 Mbps. What’s more, EoC tends to be less costly on a per Mbps basis than bonded T1 lines.

Is your business straining its WAN connection to get the bandwidth you need? More speed may be less expensive than you think. Get competitive quotes for 10 Mbps bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper services and see if now is the time to make the move.

How Capital Starved Companies Upgrade Technology

Here’s a business dilemma. The economy is improving, albeit slowly, and you have both the opportunity to capture additional business and a need to fend off competitors who are eyeing your share of the market with hungry looks. Unfortunately, you’ve been in survival mode so long that there isn’t much capital left in the savings account. Bankers make funny faces when they look at your loan applications. Is there any hope you can get new technology on-board before things get really desperate?

Conventional financing methods may not be working so well these days, but technology has given us other options for upgrading our technical plant. Most interesting is the option to deal with capital limitations by avoiding capital investments completely. How can you do that? Rent instead of own. The technical term for this is hosted solutions.

When you think of hosting, the first thing that comes to mind is website hosting. This is a huge industry with so much competition that you can host a small site now for just a few dollars a month and get a reseller account so you can provide hosting for other businesses for around $25 a month. For small to medium size businesses, the economic advantage of running your own web servers has all but vaporized. Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that downloading the Apache software and running your own server made a lot of sense for even home based tech businesses.

Now let’s scale this idea up for larger businesses. You’re probably thinking that you absolutely have to support your in-house data center because those racks and racks full of servers have such a special configuration that you can’t possibly buy the same service from someone else.

Oh? Have you been watching what’s happening in the world of cloud computing? Sure, the largest installations are targeted to the very high end of the market. But that cutting edge technology is now a few years old. Cloud computing isn’t something all that esoteric anymore. Just like web servers matured from a unique and proprietary product over the course of a couple of decades, cloud computing is rapidly moving up the learning curve. More and more companies are offering cloud services on a competing basis.

This is great news for businesses of all sizes. It’s relatively easy to go out now and rent your Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) by the hour. Why do that? For one thing, there’s no need for a capital investment. You won’t own the equipment and you won’t have to maintain it. It won’t even be installed on your premises. For another, you have an instantly scalable, nearly unlimited set of resources at your command. No need to get capital requisitions to buy equipment in anticipation of a need six months down the road. You only need to request and pay for the capacity you need right now. That’s processing, storage and bandwidth. If and when you need more, add it incrementally. If demand slacks, scale down your cloud resources.

The same discussion applies to Software as a Service (SaaS). Use collaboration or CRM cloud services and pay by the seat by the month. You can add resources easily as you hire new employees. No need to have a lot of facilities on hand in anticipation.

Telecommunications now also fits the rent rather than buy model. Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, telephone systems leave the telephone sets on your desks but move the switching system and its telco trunk lines to the cloud. You get a rich feature set and the ability to integrate mobile smartphones as well as traditional desk sets. No need to worry about maintenance and dealing with the telephone companies. The service provider takes care of that. Plus, you have no investment. Some plans even include new IP business phones as part of your monthly fee.

If it has anything to do with computing or communications, you now have the opportunity to avoid raising capital and simply pay as you go for the technology resources you need to conduct your business. Interested? See what’s available from Cloud Computing Carriers right now... before you write another capital plan.