What’s to Become of Data Centers?

Both large scale colocation centers and traditional in-house company data centers are being challenged by cost and technology. Here’s a quick graphical look at what’s going on right now in this infographic courtesy of David Vellante on Wikibon:


Your Data Center Options
Are you thinking that it may not make sense to invest in a new data center or continue running the one you have now? There are a wide range of options available from colocation at a major commercial data center to cloud hosted services to choose from. Call now toll free at (888) 848-8749 to speak with a product specialist who can recommend everything from WAN connectivity up to complete IT outsourcing or describe your data center needs for quick quotes on appropriate services.

Concentric Cloud Solutions Virtualizes Your Business

You’ve been hearing a lot about virtualization recently and are wondering if it could be the answer to your unpredictable business costs. The only problem is that you don’t know quite where to start. It seems like there’s a lot to know before you can start deploying virtualized anything. Relax. Concentric will take care of that for you.

Virtualization started out in the local data center but it’s now moved to the cloud. The whole idea behind virtualization is that you can get higher performance out of a hardware infrastructure by making one server look like many servers and a cluster of small servers look like a super computer.

Why not just pair off software applications and computers? That’s the way we’ve done it for generations, ever since the days of ENIAC. It certainly works but it’s inefficient. As loads vary, you may be using only a portion of a server or have is so overloaded that you really need two. It takes so long to order new equipment, get it mounted and spun up, that you can’t respond quickly to changing needs. In order to get reliability, you wind up over-provisioning hardware. Then a big unexpected surge of activity comes in and you crash.

Virtualization separates server functionality from server hardware. You may have a dozen servers running on a single physical machine. You may have one server running over a dozen machines. All the magic is done in software, so changes can be made almost instantly.

This is the secret of the cloud. Racks and racks full of physical servers can be sliced and diced into virtual servers provisioned with a few keystrokes. Disk farms become virtualized storage. If one company is the sole user of all this, it’s called a private cloud. If many customers can share the same resources without interference, it’s called a public cloud. The owner and operator of the public cloud has just one job. That is to keep the cloud running no matter what happens. Each tenant needs to feel like they are the only one in the cloud no matter how many clients there really are.

If you do it right, you can move your back office infrastructure to the cloud. That’s what Concentric Cloud Solutions is offering businesses as an alternative to in-house IT and Telecom facilities. Services include Enterprise Cloud that offers on-demand cloud computing on a pay as you go or monthly prepaid plan. Cloud Storage complements cloud computing by making storage sharing and management of files and data available in the cloud. Managed Services offer a private cloud environment for companies that still want dedicated servers but don’t want to make the investment in-house. Smaller companies can benefit from Cloud Hosting to support websites, email and domains.

Content providers have special needs when it comes to getting their products to their customers. Concentric Acceleration Services address these needs for digital media, online content, mobile and web-based applications. Content Caching accelerates deliver of static web content that is repeatedly downloaded. Application Acceleration does the same for dynamic content you find on information portals, e-commerce apps and social media. Video content, such as webcasts and movies, is improved by Video Streaming Content Acceleration.

Cloud Voice Services address “your other network.” Telephony has occupied its own proprietary space until recently. Now the trend is converged voice and data networks to get to one network for everything. The next step is moving the voice support infrastructure to the cloud just like you do data servers. Concentric offers a Cloud Contact Center so you can establish virtual contact centers that free agents to work from anywhere. Pricing is pay as you go. Interactive Voice Response, Intelligent Call Routing, Conferencing and Concentric Connect create a suite of services that make communications in the cloud the sensible way to go.

Are you facing another round of capital investment to upgrade an aging or inadequate infrastructure? Don’t sign any loan applications until you first take a look a virtualized cloud-based solutions for voice and data. You’ll have greater flexibility and minimal investment with pay as you go solutions.

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.

Managed Voice over MPLS For High Quality Enterprise Telephony

Companies with multiple locations are rapidly discovering the cost and performance advantages of MPLS networks. MPLS VPN networks are becoming the preferred way to interconnect multiple sites around the country and around the world. But what do you do about your voice services?


The traditional approach is to keep voice and data separate. The telephone system has a proven legacy based on switched circuit analog and digital trunking. Most PBX systems are set up to interface to standardized copper pair analog business lines or ISDN PRI digital trunks. These are your portal to the worldwide PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network that links every telephone set on Earth.

This traditional approach to business telephony has the advantage of guaranteed connectivity and proven voice quality. The incentive to change to something more advanced comes from potential cost savings and productivity features.

There are huge cost savings possible if you can combine your voice and data networks and keep your internal phone calls off the PSTN. Isn’t that what Enterprise VoIP about? That’s exactly what many major corporations are doing. But only well-healed companies can afford to manage their own nationwide converged private line networks. When it comes to international connections, the costs can go up dramatically. Is there a more cost effective option?

Why not use the same MPLS networks that provide data connectivity for your many geographically diverse sites to also carry your voice traffic? Well, why not? MPLS networks already have the requisite quality of service controls to ensure that voice packets won’t get trampled by data packets. The entire network is managed to ensure low latency, jitter and packet loss. It seems like a good match for IP telephony.

Indeed it is. That’s what VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is all about. With VoMPLS, your internal telephone traffic stays on your own network. In fact, it’s the same network that interconnects all your PCs and other network device. You’ll only pay per-minute telephone charges when your calls have to go “off net” to the public phone system. You can make that connection yourself with ISDN PRI trunks connected to your company PBX or you can outsource call termination to a SIP trunking service.

Does VoMPLS make sense for your company or organization? New services, including one just announced by AireSpring, are making this option the best cost/performance choice more and more. Find out with a quick inquiry about Voice over MPLS network options.