Virtual Server & Storage

Our InfraStructure as a Service offering provides organisations with a virtual set of secure servers and storage built on a resilient, high  performance cluster of best of breed technologies hosted in a secure, high availability data centre. It is an ideal solution for organisations wishing to have off site, secure and managed infrastructure to replace or compliment their own server and storage infrastructure.

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Because this service is already connected within our core network, we can provide fast scalable connectivity and direct uncontended Internet connectivity to any applications required. It is an ideal solution for content management for elements such as AV definition files and OS and application patches as all remote sites can direct access the central hosted systems and stored content.

These servers and storage can also be used to serve your own business specific applications.
Note:  the remote management and administration of business specific applications is excluded from the service offering – the customer will retain ownership and control of this function, however the service does include proactive management and administration of the underlying hardware, OS and required resource infrastructure.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources are available at several nodes in the network. Each cluster is based around a common reference design comprising of Dell Servers, EMC storage, Brocade storage fabric and Cisco networking.

There are many benefits to deploying certain applications in this way:

• Reduced Network overheads
• Increased performance in terms of remote access
• The ability to scale up or down as required without having to procure additional Infrastructure resources.
• Little or no capital expenditure

Servers

• RAID1 local disks for booting hypervisor
• Backup SD card which can be used to boot hypervisor in event of controller failure.
• Dual PSU’s connected to different circuits.
• 8 Network cards, 4 Intel & 4 Broadcom for driver diversity
• Memory mirroring

Storage Fabric

• Independent East & West brocade storage switches
• Dual single port 4Gbps HBA’s connected to separate PCI-X busses on each server

Storage

• Hot spare disk per shelf
• 15k RPM RAID 1/0 for Tier 1 Applications
• 10k RPM RAID6 for Tier 2 Applications
• 7.2k RPM RAID 1/0 for Bulk storage Tier 3 Applications.

We generally propose a defined resource pool – a typical configuration for a centralised patch management server would be:

• Up to 2 GHz CPU
• 3 GB RAM
• 20 TIER 1 Storage
• 50 – 100 GB TIER2/3 storage (depending on size of patch repository)

Configured on our VMware virtualisation platform, your servers would be contained within a high availability DRS resource pool and connected to a dedicated Customer port group connected to your network.