What happens if a data centre disappears?
New product delivers fully resilient and flexible hosting for mission critical IT systems
London, UK, 17 April 2007 – British authorities recently uncovered a terrorist plot to take out key Internet nodes in London*. In response to this and other growing threats – such as climate change-driven natural disasters – Interoute has launched a new Virtual Hosting platform. As Europe’s largest next generation network, Interoute uniquely provides a Geographic Failover capability ensuring that companies’ valuable business systems keep working even if a disruption occurs in multiple locations.
Modern networks are vital to most businesses – not just ecommerce giants like Amazon, eBay or YouTube – but also for all smaller companies that use IT systems as the backbone of their business activities. Failure of the infrastructure could quickly result in major revenue losses; the international consulting group Gartner estimates that the cost of IT downtime can run as high as €33,280 per hour**. For the rapidly growing mid-sized enterprise market in Europe, the resulting loss of business could run into billions of Euros. Interoute’s Virtual Hosting provides organisations with the ability to be live one hour after a major incident.
In the face of such a threat, Geographic Failover has been the most reliable way of safeguarding a company. But with the traditional Dedicated Hosting model, where companies have to essentially re-create physical back-ups in each location, this solution has generally been too costly for most enterprises. With the fully scalable Virtual Hosting platform, this important feature for business critical systems is now an affordable choice. If disaster strikes, the virtually hosted applications can very quickly be restarted on an alternative machine in a different location running on Interoute’s next-generation network.
The Virtual Hosting platform in each location is fully redundant, offering high availability backed by strict SLA’s. The functionality is very similar to managed hosting on a dedicated machine, and allows customers a choice of operating systems with full access to install applications. Instead of buying or leasing servers for multiple years, companies can deploy Virtual Hosting solutions for as briefly as a few months, allowing customers increased flexibility. Furthermore, the customers do not have to worry about hardware costs and delivery times: the virtual machines are housed in servers that are already in place in Interoute’s data centres, ready to handle companies’ data needs. A solution can be up and running in as little as a single working day, following receipt of order.
Interoute currently operates seven data centres throughout Europe – Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Madrid, Munich, Paris and London-all connected via the Continent’s most advanced next-generation voice and data network. With Virtual Hosting platforms located in multiple data centres, Interoute can offer Geographic Failover for mission critical applications. If and when disaster strikes in one city or geographic region, Interoute immediately switches virtual servers to a different data centre in a different geographical location.
The data centres provide the highest infrastructure reliability and security in the industry, featuring seven layers of security, dual power feeds, backup generators and continuous monitoring. In addition, Virtual Hosting customers benefit from a virtual machine that’s always up-to-date with the latest hardware without having to pay for expensive upgrades on their own machines.
The Virtual Hosting platform also helps companies address the everyday “crises” posed by traffic surges. For example, successful marketing campaigns can overwhelm even generally stable websites; airport closures and flight delays can do the same for the online businesses of airlines, agencies, etc. And almost every manufacturer has experienced business-damaging delays due to a slowdown in network performance during peak usage times. The Virtual Hosting platform can accommodate those crunch times, without companies having to worry about additional CPU power or hardware. The Virtual Hosting platform allows Interoute to quickly add additional memory or processing power to a virtual server to help the site cope with the increased demand.
”In today’s business world, protecting your data is critical to survival,” says Gareth Williams Interoute’s President of Global Markets. “Interoute’s Virtual hosting platform makes this an economically viable option for companies that thought this level of protection was beyond their reach. It builds on the years of experience we gained managing business critical Dedicated Hosting solutions and is also an ideal solution for customers needing to react to the unpredictable nature of conducting business online in an online world.”
Notes to editors
*Source: The Sunday Times, March 11, 2007, Al-Qaeda plot to bring down UK internet, David Leppard.
**Source: Estimates from Gartner Group of the cost of downtime of a computer network and from Contingency Planning Research of system downtime costs per hour.
About Interoute
Interoute is Europe's fastest growing communications technology provider and owner operator of Europe's most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, encompassing over 47,000 kms of fibre. Its full-service next generation network serves more than 12,000 customers from retail to aerospace, every major European incumbent as well as the major operators of North America, East and South Asia, governments, universities and research agencies. These organisations find Interoute the ideal partner for hosting content, providing wholesale transit services, corporate access or creating new services. With established operations throughout mainland Europe and in North America, Interoute also owns and operates dense city networks throughout Europe's major business centres. More than €1 billion in e-commerce transactions flows through its data centres each day, making Interoute a key part of Europe’s Digital Supply Chain. http://www.interoute.com%20/
