Can You Benefit From New Cloud Networks?

You’ve been reading articles, Tweets and blog posts about cloud computing for some time now and wondering if there is any way that this new technology can help your business. It seems like so many of the cloud offerings are targeted toward very large corporations. Is there any way that cloud services can work for the small and medium size companies?

In fact, the cloud has as much or more potential for reducing cost, speeding processes and improving productivity at small to medium size operations than for gigantic companies. Why? Because large companies have large budgets and large IT staffs that can build their own private clouds if they want to. The smaller company finds it harder to come up with the capital investment and staffing budgets to support this type of innovation.

What the SMBs (Small to Medium size Businesses) need is a cloud solutions supplier who already has the infrastructure and expertise to take them to the cloud. What you need is New Cloud Networks.

What’s different about New Cloud Networks is that they are specializing in the needs of small and medium size companies. They operate their own enterprise quality data center with full server hardware redundancy, dual fiber optic bandwidth connections, two redundant power feeds, redundant uninterruptible power supplies and diesel power to backup the backup power supplies. That gives them a robust hardware platform with 99.999% guaranteed uptime (5 nines).

All of this is virtualized to make it available to even the smallest business. The beauty of virtualization is that you don’t need to invest in more hardware resources than you need just because there is a certain entry level setup to have a data center at all. In fact YOU don’t make any capital investment at all. That’s been taken care of by the cloud vendor. What cloud service providers do is create a massive data center large enough to serve the needs of as many clients as they anticipate. They divvy up this capacity to each client based on how much is needed. The economy of scale means that you can have as much or little capacity as you need and only have to pay for what you actually use.

This is a more profound change in the technology approach for business than it appears at first glance. The idea of not having to raise capital to go out and buy servers and the data center infrastructure that supports them is certainly an advantage. Perhaps even more of an advantage is the agility of being able to scale up and scale down to match business conditions. You can’t really do that when you have long lead times for the procurement and installation process. You can when your resources are in a virtualized environment that takes only a few keystrokes to adjust. Now expenses can track business activity like never before.

What sort of cloud products are available through New Cloud Networks? It starts with cloud computing, of course. That means elastic computing resources that are quickly scaled up and down. Compute cycles are only part of the solution, though. To match virtual servers, you need virtualized storage. This is an infinitely deep pool of disk storage that can be allocated to your company as needed. You don’t go out and buy drives any more. You simply order up more virtual drives. The physical redundant hard drives are already in place and spinning. Likewise, bandwidth is elastic and available to the extent needed to support your computing and storage cloud. There are no long lead times to install a bigger data pipe. You simply use more of the massive capacity that is already wired-in.

By picking the right solutions provider, your small to medium size business can, indeed, gain the benefits of the cloud revolution. Start small with backup storage in the cloud, email hosting, or perhaps a dedicated server or two. Once you see how reliable and cost effective cloud solutions are, chances are you’ll never go back to buying, maintaining and upgrading your own racks of equipment. Get competitive cloud services pricing and complementary consulting by cloud experts now to see just how much you can benefit.

Cloud Service Providers Colocate With Customers

There’s a new migration on. No, not the migration from local data centers to the cloud. It’s a migration of cloud service providers to colocate with their customers.

Why? It’s the rude awakening that companies suffer when they find that applications running way out there don’t have the same zip as the ones running on servers down the hall. That can be fixed, of course. It requires engineering your connections to the cloud so that they have sufficient amounts of bandwidth and very low latency, jitter and packet loss. But why go that that expense when you can just cozy up to your service provider with little more than a long patch cord connecting you?

That’s what Telx thinks. They’re throwing open their doors and working to lure cloud service providers to take up residence in one or more of their high performance colocation centers. It’s an acknowledgement that the speed of computing has gotten to the point where interconnections are the weak link. The venerable T1 line or DS3 connection that worked so well when all you needed to do was surf the Web, exchange email or generate sales leads quickly chokes when you start adding virtual servers by the dozens or hundreds.

There are a couple of big crunches that strain the cloud service model. One is business processes that are now automated and support hundreds or thousands of employees. The other is high performance e-commerce, with enormous catalogs and thousands of simultaneous shoppers who have little patience for sluggish servers and none at all for errors in their shopping experience.

The cloud is becoming a victim of its own success. Cloud service providers have mastered the technology of being able to ramp up or down the number of servers online in a matter of seconds. Storage is a bottomless well that data fills as needed. Public-facing bandwidth is easily handled with multiple Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Internet connections with enough margin to serve all customers. While cloud companies have gotten used to this scale of resources, most businesses have not. They don’t have the private line connectivity to take full advantage of near-infinite, near-instantaneous computing resources.

More savvy companies have mastered the connectivity issues, but who’s going to turn down the opportunity to get more performance for less money? The notion of being on the same floor of the same building with your service provider and ditching the telecom line in favor of a local fiber or wire connection has a lot of appeal. The issues of bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss simply disappear.

A lot of medium and larger companies already have equipment in colocation centers, such as Telx. The economic tradeoff between running your own environmentally controlled facilities with backup power, fire suppression and round the clock monitoring and simply renting space in a larger facility with its economies of scale makes colocation attractive. On top of that is the fact that you have easier access to competitive carrier services with more attractive pricing than you can get locally. Now, add to these advantages the opportunity to connect to a cloud service provider in-house and you are looking at really attractive cost vs performance figures.

The new Telx Cloud Connectivity Centers with cloud-optimized infrastructure to support cloud service providers in each of their 15 data centers is an idea who’s time has come. Enterprise users and cloud companies are like opposite magnetic poles trying to get as close to each other as possible. Colocation is the obvious answer.

Can your business benefit from colocation as a service provider or service user? Get pricing and technical specs for the IT resources you need and compare with what you are doing now.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.