Month: January 2015

Claranet boosts storage platform with 100% SSD arrays, delivered by HP

High-speed Solid State Disk arrays with guaranteed performance

Claranet has completed a major investment in its storage capabilities, furnishing its storage services with Solid State arrays from HP and demonstrating its commitment to growing its hosting services and offering world class customer solutions.

Claranet has invested over £1 million into a new shared storage platform across three of its data centres, introducing a three-tiered model of storage. Each tier will have a guaranteed Quality of Service in terms of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). Both the standard and the premium tiers will be delivered from 100 per cent Solid State Drives from HP 3PAR arrays, providing a cutting edge platform available on a pay-as-you-grow per GB/Month model.

Commenting on the investment, Neil Thomas, Claranet’s Product Director, said:

This latest investment in our data centres will put our storage capabilities at the forefront of the industry, and grant our customers greater flexibility as to how they store and access their data, helping them to achieve low levels of latency for real-time applications. Claranet manages petabytes of customer data in its data centres, with a lot of this managed on shared storage platforms. These shared platforms give customers the ability to pay-as-you-go and buy storage as they need it, on an OpEx basis, as a fully managed service.

“Business applications have differing security, availability and performance requirements, and we have seen an increasing demand for high performance storage solutions to underpin modern IT applications. While we’ve offered high performance SSD solutions for many years, we see them becoming the norm, rather than the exception for large parts of the IT estate. The ability to guarantee levels of performance, while offering cost effective solutions for data with lower performance requirements, will become critical. Investment such as this ensures that we maintain our position as one of the leading MSPs in Europe and continue to offer our customers premium levels of service”.

Robert Wigger, Vice President Service Provider Business EMEA, HP, added:

Claranet’s investment in this technology is the largest investment in 100% SSD platforms we’ve seen in the UK service provider market and positions them as a leader amongst European Managed Services Providers. The explosion of data in recent years, some of it business-critical, some not, has left many businesses at odds as to what to do with it, and where to store it. By investing in SSD technology, coupled with the ability to guarantee performance on a shared platform, Claranet will be able to help its customers deal with the ‘data question’, offering higher levels of performance, improved reliability and lower latency.”

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IT leaders face new levels of complexity as they seek to address business needs

Partnerships key to navigating increasingly complex IT landscape, says Claranet

The cloud industry has perpetuated a notion that cloud is simple and cheap, when, in fact, the opposite is often true. While the cloud has enabled all sorts of flexibility and agility, the explosion of available choice has actually driven complexity for most IT teams. As this accelerates, IT leaders will need greater support from their providers to navigate the increasingly complex IT landscape, says Claranet.

The principals behind cloud computing services make IT a simpler, and sometimes cheaper, proposition for organisations to adopt than traditional forms of procuring and using technology. However, while cloud has helped to drive simplicity for end users, it has also increased the capacity for businesses to be more demanding of their IT departments, while expanding the number of potential suppliers and systems that an IT department has to manage and secure. It’s widely accepted that there will not be a single cloud computing platform for all requirements, and that therefore Hybrid cloud solutions will be the way of the future. However, as IT environment spans over a greater number of different ecosystems, the management overhead grows.

Neil Thomas, Claranet’s Product Director, said:

Cloud computing has been marketed as a simpler, easier and cheaper alternative to on-premises IT, but in many respects, the situation is now considerably more complex. Behind the veneer of cloud’s simplicity sits an increasingly complex and difficult-to-manage ecosystem, creating new challenges for the IT department.

“As the cloud industry matures, it’s becoming clear that there is a vast amount of choice, and that there is no one cloud solution for all requirements, creating the more complicated world of Hybrid IT. While choice is a good thing, it also risks becoming a headache as applications and data are spread over multiple systems, creating an overhead that many IT managers don’t have the resource to deal with or manage. Although start-ups might just find it easier to put everything into public cloud, the picture for most businesses is more complex.

“Mid-tier organisations are faced with increasingly complex IT estates, and must balance legacy considerations, different software solutions, and multiple suppliers, which demands new skillsets. Many will have spent a long time trying to consolidate their systems down, but it’s starting to explode out in terms of choice, and the optimum solution today might involve using multiple different infrastructure providers – shifting the IT department’s focus away from the technology to supplier management.

“A supplier who can work over different infrastructures will therefore be essential going forward, simplifying the management process and freeing up the IT department to focus on core business activities. The successful IT departments use their supply chain correctly and partner with trusted suppliers that can offer the support they need. This in turn can help them to deliver the business agility that the industry said that cloud would deliver,” Thomas concluded.

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