Office Telephone Service Via Cloud

When you think of office telephone service, the thing that comes to mind is a phone on every desk with an easy 3 or 4 digit number to call other phones in-house and access to an outside line whenever you need one. Today, that picture also includes your own direct dial phone number and personal voice mail. Transfers, call forwarding and conference calls are easy to set up. So, where is the equipment that runs this phone system?

For most people, the answer is “who cares?” The actual phone system could be anywhere. As long as it works all day, every day, the mechanics of how this is accomplished is beyond the interest of all but a few people. The ones who care are the business manager who pays the phone bills, the IT person or people who quietly keep everything humming, and the provider of the service.

That provider could be the local phone company. That’s how it was for at least half of the last century. For many if not most companies, at least part of the system is in-house. This could be a small wireless phone system with a couple of lines and a half-dozen handsets. It could be a key system using desk phones with a separate button for each of 4 to 6 outside lines. It might even be a PBX phone system mounted in a back room with lines coming in from each phone and going out to the telephone company.

Since very few people are all that interested in running their own in-house telephone switching system, why not ditch the whole thing? Does that mean going back to analog phones connected to the local Telco? Not at all. Today it means going forward to a cloud based solution that will give you all the functionality you have now and more.

Cloud communications is the new PBX. It’s also the new key system and the new small office system with only a few telephones. It may even provide your broadband Internet.

The cloud telephone system is more formally known as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. You already know what hosting is. Chances are that you already buy a hosting solution from one of the many online providers. This could be a shared solution, a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server of your own. The economics of setting up your own data center just to run a web server don’t make sense anymore. There is so much competition in the hosting field that simple solutions are only a few dollars a month. Dedicated servers are only a few hundreds of dollars per month. That includes the box, the bandwidth and the IT services to keep it all running.

Larger companies that run their own customized packages for business information may have elected to just add one more server for the web to the racks they already have in their data centers. It hasn’t made much sense to go out of house for a solution when you need a large data center and staffing to optimize your business. Well, not till recently. Now these major corporations are shutting down their in-house data centers and moving to cloud computing solutions in droves. Why? For the same reasons that make sense to outsource telephone systems. You don’t need to invest in capital and you don’t need a staff to maintain it.

The point is that cloud services have evolved to the point where both your computing and your telephone can be supplied by a cloud vendor at a lower overall cost with more functionality and lower in-house staffing than doing it yourself. There are other advantages, too. You pay for a cloud telephone system per seat per month. You only buy as many seats as you need. When you need more, you order more. There is no need to maintain extra capacity just in case business picks up suddenly. Provisioning of extra resources is fast and easy because the cloud has all the capacity you need.

Now that you have office telephone solutions in the cloud as an option, is there any reason to be stuck with a technical solution that was “modern” decades ago? At the very least, take a look at what’s available in the cloud, what it costs compared to what you are paying now, and if you can get all new phones included with your service.



Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

Why Demand a SAS 70 Type II Data Center?

If you are considering a move to the cloud or colocation center, you want to be sure that you are dealing with a high quality operation that has the controls in place to ensure the privacy and security of your data. If you are in certain industries, such as health care and financial services, you may well be required to use this type of facility.

SAS 70 is about a very structured audit into the operations of a company that handles customers’ data. It’s done to a standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) called Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70, Service Organizations. This isn’t something you run yourself. You hire an independent accounting and auditing firm that performs the audit and issues a written report.

Actually there are two audits and reports. Type I is used to assess the suitability of controls that the organization has put into practice to achieve the security objectives. Type II includes that information, but is also a review of how effective the controls have operated during the time period being reviewed. That’s why Type II is so desirable. It shows that management has not only created a system but is actually performing to the procedures it has put in place.

What sort of things are audited? Important areas for the auditor include management and organization policies and procedures, physical security of the data center, logical security to ensure only authorized personnel have access to customer data, network security and management, application security and change control, system maintenance controls, incident reporting and resolution, change management, transaction processing, use of subcontractors and business continuity.

You can think of SAS 70 as something akin to the International Standards Organization ISO-9000 quality management standards and auditing for manufacturing organizations. They’re not the same thing, but both have the goal of providing assurance that you are dealing with a company that has effective processes and procedures in place and follows them. The principle is that sloppy seat-of-the-pants operations tend to deliver results that are all over the map. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. You are much better off with a provider that can produce the same results over and over reliably.

What you want in a data center or cloud service provider is an operation that is secure and reliable above all. You wouldn’t prop open the back door to your in-house data center and let anyone who wanted to wander around unsupervised. Likewise, you want the peace of mind that the colocation facility that houses your servers has them secured in locked racks or cages and that nobody who doesn’t belong there can get into the data center at all.

The same is true of the networks that transport packets in and out of your servers. Those connections and the data that traverses them need to be under strict control so that your systems and data cannot be accessed by anyone who doesn’t have your express approval. One advantage of moving to a colocation center is that you are literally within walking distance of your carrier and perhaps your cloud service provider. With all the connections in-house, there is less likelihood of service disruptions or outsiders being able to tap into your data stream.

Service reliability is important as well. Having the servers and appliances locked down is great, but they also have to be on-line 24/7 to fulfill their mission. That’s where backup electrical power, cooling and network connections help keep your applications running non-stop is so valuable. The availability of trained technicians nearby is a way to ensure that if something does go wrong, it gets immediate attention.

Are you interested in moving to a high quality colocation facility or cloud service provider? Many now offer SAS70 Type II certification, so be sure to ask for that assurance when evaluating vendors. Get pricing and location for colocation and cloud services using SAS70 Type II Data Centers.

Online Backup For Disaster Recovery

In computing, disaster is always just around the corner. There are so many potential points of failure. Disks can crash at any time. Data can be accidentally erased. Both equipment and data can be stolen or destroyed by fire, storm or flood. So, why are we so convinced that it just isn’t going to happen?


The problem with computer disasters is that you may never get a warning. One minute everything is humming along nicely. The next minute, it’s all gone. That scares most of us just enough that we occasionally copy important files to other computers, alternative hard drives, thumb drives, CD ROMs or DVD ROMs. It’s a lot better than nothing, but the hit and miss nature of these backups means that there are long periods when data is changing but only in one place.

The other weakness of our ad-hoc personal backup systems is that they only protect from certain types of losses. A CD ROM backup protects against a hard disk failure. It doesn’t protect from natural disasters that wipe out the entire office, not merely a few computers or one hard drive. Just what would a tornado, hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake do to your facility? Think your backup disks would still be in good condition? Maybe. Maybe not. Can you really take that chance?

The traditional solution for robust backups is to send copies of your files to a remote location, such as a separate data center across town. Smaller companies store CD ROM backups in bank vaults away from the company facilities. Today’s solution is online backup. Everybody has a broadband connection and there are companies that specialize in being that secure data center that you can’t afford.

One of the best online backup companies is SOS Online Backup. They’ve been around since 2001 and have won numerous industry awards.

A really important feature that SOS offers is called Engage Live Protect. It detects whenever a file has been changed and immediately backs up that file. This certainly takes the weak link of remembering what to backup out of the loop. With file backups happening as needed, there is also no long time lag to the next scheduled backup during which something can go wrong.

Another nice feature of this service is that you can access your files on the Web from any computer with a web browser. You don’t have to use the computer that the file came from, which helps if that machine smokes. You can even share files by using an email address. SOS lets you backup to five computers with one simple account. There are enterprise level services available for larger organizations with many employees.

Have you integrated iPhones or iPads into your organization? SOS iPhone App lets you access all of your files anytime, anywhere from your iOS mobile device.

The big hesitation many people have with online backup systems is security. How can you be sure the bad guys won’t steal your data right out from under you? SOS protects you with a three-tiered encryption system that offers military grade security. The data to be backed up is first encrypted right on your computer using 256 bit AES encryption. While in-transit, 128 bit SSL is employed to secure the link. Finally, the data is stored using 1024 bit AES encryption.

Are you feeling a bit squeamish about all those files on your computer that could go “poof” at any time? How much would that hurt? Don’t let it happen. Get SOS Online Backup now and rest easy that your important files are stored away securely in the cloud, ready to retrieve at any time.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth For Remote Backup

Most companies have or should have a plan for protecting their valuable data against disaster. Simple disk and tape backups may protect against a crashed PC or server, but offer little or no protection when you get hit with fire, flood, tornado, hurricane or earthquake. For this reason, offsite is the way to go for data backup.

The question become how far away is safe and what do you need to efficiently transfer data. The data center across town will save you if your building catches fire, but won’t do much when an F5 tornado levels the entire town or the levee breaks and everything submerges. You need to get to a different geographical area where the threats are different than where you are now. Tornados aren’t likely to hit Denver and Biloxi at the same time. A big earthquake may shake San Francisco, but it’s not likely to be shaking Chicago at the same time.

Corporations with regional offices are well situated to back each other up. You may want to consider having each office back up data for a couple of other offices hundreds or thousands of miles away. It’s a lot of data flowing, but if one office gets taken out, you’ve got the data in at least two other places.

Having geographically diverse locations back up each other’s data fits well with the network topology you need anyway. Certainly, you want all of your locations to be able to communicate. Some companies do this through a private star network centered on their headquarters location. Others use a mesh network based on MPLS with each location connecting to the nearest POP in their city. That’s more robust because there is no single point of failure like you have with HQ coordinating all the traffic.

What you need for data backup is bandwidth and lots of it. With dedicated line services you are paying for the full capacity even though the lines mostly sit idle after hours. Those are the traditional times that IT departments do data backups anyway. You can load your lines to the max to transfer data files without affecting other business operations if you do this in the wee hours.

Other companies like the idea of data mirroring. This is a real time process that keeps two or more copies of a data set completely synchronized at different locations. The advantage is that you can recover almost instantly when you lose a facility. The tradeoff is that you’ll need much higher bandwidth levels than for backup file transfers that can take their time overnight.

What type of bandwidth is available to support your backup or mirroring needs? Most likely you’ll want fiber optic connections, although smaller organizations may get by with 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper where it is available. Otherwise you’re looking at traditional SONET services that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.49 Gbps or OC-1921 at 9.95 Gbps. A good alternative is Carrier Ethernet service that is highly scalable and includes popular speeds such as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10,000 Mbps 10 Gigabit Ethernet ( 10 GigE).

Both SONET and Ethernet are widely available for long haul connections through competitive fiber optic carriers, plus last mile connections to high bandwidth MPLS networks with a regional or nationwide service footprint. Which topology you pick depends on how many locations you want to interconnect and how the pricing works out. Ethernet tends to be less expensive than SONET in most situations and MPLS networks have the advantage of offering more bandwidth at lower costs than most dedicated lines.

Fiber optic connections are also valuable if you are getting your storage in the cloud, as many companies are now doing. The advantage of cloud storage is that it gives you the geographical diversity you require, the security of a major data center and nearly unlimited resources as your data storage needs change. You’ll also avoid the capital expense and staffing required to run your own data centers.

Are you in need of robust high bandwidth connections to support your data backup and mirroring needs? If so, get pricing and availability of SONET and Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth services now. You may also wish to explore cloud storage options as another approach to disaster protection and recovery.



Note: Data center photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.

Infrastructure as a Service Providers

Cloud computing is generally acknowledged to comprise three levels. These are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The most basic of these and the foundation of the others is infrastructure in the cloud.

Infrastructure is pretty much what it sounds like. This the basic hardware and operating system software to make it work. Competition for infrastructure in the cloud is that same infrastructure in your own data center. So, why would you want to up and move to the cloud?

There are good business reasons for IaaS. Infrastructure is expensive to buy, it requires constant attention and frequent maintenance, and it starts going obsolete almost as soon as you have it installed. Computing infrastructure is also finicky. It needs a special temperature and humidity controlled environment, physical security and fire protection, and large amounts of both operating and backup power.

There’s also the matter of how much to buy. You certainly need enough resources to accommodate your anticipated daily activities. How about the unforeseen? It’s not that unusual for a company’s product to catch on suddenly, resulting in a flurry of unexpected orders. The same is true for any content that goes viral. One day you’re coasting along at a modest level of activity. The next day the word is out and your servers are brought to their knees by a sudden flurry of new users. All of the social networking sites have experienced this phenomenon at one time or another.

Cloud service providers offer a way to address the limitations of local data centers, often with a considerable cost advantage. Cloud infrastructure providers build a business on scale. They create a large data center with racks full of virtualized and dedicated servers. These are connected with pools of disk storage, security appliances, and multiple diverse network connectivity. All of this is housed in a high security, environmentally controlled facility with both battery and generator backup power.

Doesn’t this sound like what you’d find at a colocation center? Indeed, there are many similarities between colos and cloud service providers. One major difference is in elasticity. An elastic resource is one that can grow and shrink at will. When you install your equipment in a colocation facility or rent equipment and services from them, it is on a well defined contract. Certainly, you have the ability to change your requirements as business conditions improve or degrade. But there’s going to be a time lag of days, weeks or longer to make the necessary changes.

Cloud services are based on a model of utility computing. You don’t need to ask your electric company to give you more or less power. You simply turn equipment on and off. Only when your requirements exceed the maximum capacity you have installed, do you need to ask for a different level of service.

Infrastructure as a Service is based on a pay for what you use basis. The cloud service provider has far more servers, disk drives, Gbps of bandwidth and other resources that you can possibly use. Their economy of scale dictates that they serve many customers, each of whom has no awareness of the presence of the others. Your services are partitioned so that no other user will take your resources or interfere with your operation.

The advantage to business users is that IaaS gives them the resources they need, when they need them, at a cost that reflects actual usage and not spare installed capacity. Capital investments and perhaps difficult to obtain financing are not required. Staffing levels are reduced because the service provider takes care of operations and maintenance on a 24/7/365 basis.

Could your business benefit from using some or many cloud services? You can have a good basis to compare with what you are doing now by getting prices and services from cloud computing providers now.

Computing In The Cloud

“Cloud computing” is the term you see everywhere lately. But what is computing in the cloud all about and are there really benefits to moving out of your own data center and into the cloud?

Cloud computing originally meant accessing a pool of computers to accomplish a task that was too big for the resources you could afford to own. You may have contributed some unused computing power to the SETI@Home program to help search for ET. It’s still going, by the way, after almost 12 years of combing through the output of radio telescope signals. The genius behind this project is to link thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of idle personal computers through broadband Internet connections. Each PC has a small but significant amount of unused processing power. By divvying up a large computing task into bite (byte?) size pieces and collecting the results, all those computers can be linked to create one enormous virtual supercomputer.

The idea of calling remotely located distributed resources a “cloud” goes back to the public telephone network and later to the Internet. Engineers would draw a picture of a cumulus cloud to represent a network who’s complexity was far more than needed to be diagramed every time you wanted to use it. Somewhere out in the misty core of that cloud were all the resources required. You only needed to understand it abstractly, the way most users don’t need to understand the detailed workings of their PC to be able to use it effectively.

If we had infinite budgets, there wouldn’t be much use for cloud computing. Every company would simply buy all the computers, software, storage, data center facilities and staffing they needed. One problem is that much of the time, especially on second and third shifts, most of capacity you pay for sits idle. Even during business hours, you need enough resources to handle peak loads to maintain employee productivity and customer satisfaction. That means your average usage is well below the maximum capacity of your systems most of the day.

Few companies have infinite budgets and today’s financial environment makes it difficult to get enough capital for all the computing capacity they would like. Even the well-heeled want to hedge their bets by just using what they need as they need it, without long term commitments. The fuzzier the future looks, the more attractive pay-as-you-go looks.

That’s the impetus behind today’s rush to all things in the cloud. Yes, you can buy processing by the minute if all you need is more computing capacity. But the cloud computing definition has expanded to include all sorts of resources including web servers, online disk storage, backup and recovery storage, standard software packages, development platforms, and even PBX telephone systems. The hosted telephone services are known specifically as cloud communications services.

What’s important from a business aspect is that you rent rather than buy these services. They are available on a per minute, per seat or per feature basis. You use what you need without regard to what other customers of the service may be doing. The cloud computing provider has the responsibility to have enough capacity on-hand to meet everyone’s needs and to keep everything up to date and running smoothly.

Does the cloud computing business model sound like an attractive option for your business? If so, or if you would simply like to investigate the options, check out features and pricing for cloud computing services. One or more of these services may well be more cost effective that what you are doing now.

Advantage of Colocation Services

Businesses are often faced with make or buy decisions. Do you create a product or service in-house or go outside to a vendor who specializes in that field? The same question arises related to telephone and computer services. So, what’s the right answer?

Like most everything, technical services decisions are very specific to your particular situation at any given time. That’s why you should revisit these issues on a regular basis - say yearly. You know what the advantages are to buying and managing your telephone and computer systems in-house. What are the advantages to going outside?

I’m going to focus on a very specific set of services you can buy, called colocation. Colocation is not quite the same as going to the “cloud,” but there are some similarities. What colocation really means is moving your telephone and/or computing resources into another facility called a colocation center or carrier hotel.

As you might suspect, there are various degrees of colocation involvement. The one that generally comes to mind is packing up your data center equipment and shipping it to a colocation facility. Within this facility, you or the facility staff re-install your equipment in a locked caged area that is not accessible to other customers of the colocation center.

What’s the point of that? It’s an economy of scale in several areas. You’ll only save on real estate if you are pressed for space now or are paying a premium per square foot in a high rent building. But it’s not just the physical footprint that’s important. The “colo” center provides equipment racks, electrical power, cooling air and physical security. They have all the power you can possibly use and the HVAC equipment to carry away the heat from high performance servers and switches. They also have backup systems in place so that you don’t need to worry about power outages. That can be important if you are located in an area subject to storm outages or questionable power lines.

Many companies move to colocation centers simply for access to unlimited amounts of cheap bandwidth. Cheap is relative, but bandwidth costs per Mbps at colocation centers are probably better than you can get at your facility. There are multiple carriers located in the same building who establish points of presence for their fiber optic networks. Construction costs are minimal, if anything, because it’s just a matter of getting a drop from a carrier’s cage to yours. If you are in a location where you are bandwidth limited, with no fiber options or sky-high construction costs, simply relocating to a colocation center can solve the problem. You still communicate with your remote facilities using T1 lines or other available bandwidth.

In addition to facilities, colocation centers are staffed around the clock. This is a real boon to smaller companies that can’t afford a 24/7 tech staff. Even larger companies may benefit from having server experts literally a few feet away from their equipment at all times. You can maintain your own equipment, of course, or hire the center personnel to perform upgrades and patches.

You also have the option to rent equipment rather than supply your own at many colocation centers. Why come up with the capital expense for new servers every few years (or few months) when you can rent fully managed servers dedicated for your use only? This approach can also make sense for telephone equipment. Why have an expensive PBX phone system on your premises and the staff to keep it running, when you can use a remote PBX that an expert provider buys and maintains?

These questions are the heart of make-buy decisions. More and more, companies are finding it makes more sense to rent from a large facilities provider than maintain equivalent systems in-house. How about your business? Could you do better at a colo center? Find out by getting colocation services prices and availability that you can compare with your own costs to make an informed decision.

What Makes High Frequency Trading Work

You’ve heard about computerized securities trading and what’s called high frequency trading. There was a lot of talk about this related to the “flash crash” last spring. But like it or not, we are in the era of automated stock trades. Some are initiated by human traders. Others are triggered by algorithms pre-programed to wait for certain conditions and then place the buy or sell orders automatically. Now, CBS News has gotten an inside looks at the machinery that makes this all possible. Watch “Robot Traders of the NYSE” and see if your jaw doesn’t drop.



Did you catch the part about how they had to equalize timing for all traders to keep the system fair? Once they started up this 3 football fields size data center, it turned out that where your servers were located physically in the infrastructure determined how fast you could get your trades to market. Yes, just the length of the cabling and whatever routing equipment was involved gave near-end locations an edge over far-end locations. How much can this really be? It was only microseconds, but in high frequency trading microseconds count.

The NYSE leveled the playing field by equalizing the access time to 65 microseconds for all players. Now, no one has an advantage... or do they?

Not all trading is executed on the New York Stock Exchange or on computers collocated within the NYSE facility. You could be trading other exchanges in New York, New Jersey or Chicago. You may need to access an overseas market from the US or vice-versa. What many broker dealers, investment management firms and hedge funds have done is collocate to a commercial facility, such as the ones that Telx operates close to major financial districts. Telx focuses on ultra-low latency connections to speed transactions to market. Through a partnership with Tata Communications, Telx offers colocation facilities in Canada, South Africa, Europe, UK and Asia. Telx and other carriers also now offer line services designed specifically for the lowest latency possible.

Do you have a requirement for unusually low latency facilities or connections? Find out what’s available in International International Low Latency Data Networks now.

Business Booming For Telx Interconnection and Colocation

While many companies remain hunkered down and wringing their hands while they wait for the economy to improve, colo provider Telx is on a building boom at their premier data center in Chicago. What kind of sense does that make in recessionary America?

It makes lots of sense if you’re clued-in to what is transforming business and finance. It’s been a long time since accountants wore green eye shades and engineers worked slide rules. Most companies have adopted computer-based workstations connected to servers in the back room. This client-server architecture had a lot to do with increasing the speed of doing business and improving employee productivity in the last few decades. But now some of the savviest companies are adopting new methods and systems to give themselves an edge over their competitors.

Remember when the original justification for computerizing processes was elimination of paper? The “paperless office” became a joke as cheap laser printers and copiers spit out reams of paper faster than they could be hauled to the recycling bin. But when you consider how the speed and volume of transactions has increased, every desk should be piled to the ceiling and the aisles crammed full of paper documents. All the paper you don’t see is in the form of bits and bytes on hard drives spinning away inside your computer and in network storage within the data center. It’s turned out that less paper is the minor benefit of computerization. The big benefit is speed.

We simply do more faster. Companies don’t mail us product brochures anymore. We pull them up online. The time from identifying a need to researching solutions to placing an order has shrunk dramatically. It can all be done from the comfort of the desktop, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Need to coordinate team activities? Let them collaborate online so that those in Seattle can mark up documents for those in New York in real time.

Nowhere has the demand for speed become more dramatic than in the financial industry. You’ve heard of high frequency trading? These are complex algorithms running on high speed servers to electronically issue buy and sell orders to the markets. We’re at the point where milliseconds and even microseconds make a difference in trade profits. The Einsteinian limit of how fast light can move through glass and wire introduces a time delay between locations that simply can’t be reduced. So, how do you beat the competition? You get closer to the markets... physically closer. That’s what Telx provides. Its proximity to the exchanges and the buy-side and sell-side firms at Telx’s strategically collocated facilities. If the upper limit to your potential speed of transaction is a length of patch cord, you are in an advantageous position compared to the competitor hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Low latency colocation facilities near the action are essential for the most advanced players in high frequency finance. But there are other reasons for collocating with suppliers, customers and service providers. The cost of bandwidth is a good reason. With many competing carriers within arm’s reach, or at least down the hall, you’ve got access to the best rates per Mbps or Gbps and none of the expensive build-out costs of stringing wires or fiber cable for miles. If bandwidth is becoming one of your biggest expenses, moving to the colo facility can be a major cost saver. This can easily be the case if your product is video or high volume e-commerce or a popular application with millions of users.

Even smaller companies that aren’t located in a downtown sweet spot for low bandwidth prices may find that colocation gives them the advantage of keeping their physical location where it is but moving their bandwidth-hungry applications to where costs are lower. Cloud computing is another way to leverage the economy of scale in putting the software and servers where the bandwidth is cheapest and accessing the service from wherever you choose to be.

Does your company have demands for low latency or high bandwidth that would benefit from Telx or similar facilities? Are you just looking for ways to reduce your bandwidth costs? If so, you should take a look at the cost advantages of colocation and cloud computing services.

Diverse Connections For Data Centers

When you are running a data center or collocating your servers in a colo data center, the reliability of the data connection is critical to the availability of your services. Any one single piece of equipment and any one data line can fail. To ensure that no link failure will take you down, you need more than just several separate network connections. You need multiple diverse data connections.

The difference between multiple connections and multiple diverse connections is in where those connections go to. If you simply have 3 Fast Ethernet or OC3 links to a single service provider, you’ve only gained a small amount of protection. Especially within the colo facility, it’s relatively unlikely that only the network cable for a particular feed or the interface circuits on both ends will fail. It’s more likely that something more catastrophic will take down the entire connection with that provider.

If you are in your own facility, you’ve got the same concern only multiplied. A service provider within a colocation facility probably has multiple incoming connections. The line that comes to your building is likely a single connection that runs for miles underground or overhead. There’s lots of opportunity for a natural disaster or someone doing construction to break that line or multi-pair bundle.

So how do you protect your interests for services that absolutely can’t afford to go down even for a few hours? In addition to the usual server redundancies, you need to get multiple data line services from different providers coming in on different routes. It does you no good to contract with three separate vendors only to find that they are all bundled in the same copper or fiber optic cable. In fact, you don’t even want them sharing the same trench or poles, if at all possible. The ideal situation is to be fed by unrelated suppliers coming from different geographical directions. The only place they’ll be in proximity is within your facility.

This requirement is common for large colocation data centers that host hundreds or thousands of companies. Within the colo center, you can typically order service from several carriers who will individually provide lines to your racks. For your own facilities, you’ll need to do your homework to ensure that your are, indeed, getting diverse data connections.

Sounds like a lot of work to find and evaluate multiple providers who will serve your business location, doesn’t it? Fortunately, there’s help available from a telecommunications service broker who routinely works with dozens of service providers offering everything from point of sale wireless data connections, through the popular T1 lines and DS3 connections, on up to OC3 and above SONET fiber optic services and Ethernet at the GigE and 10GigE levels. You can save yourself a lot of grief and a lot of time by letting the broker work with the available carriers to meet your requirements. What’s that extra service going to cost you? Nothing. Nothing, at all.

Seems to only make sense to get some complementary expert consulting help with your critical infrastructure projects. Call the toll free number or put in an online inquiry now and you’ll be getting the support you need almost immediately.