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.”

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

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.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

Christmas is the highlight of the UK retail calendar. As the public look to open their purses during the festive period, retailers place much emphasis and energy into maximising their sales at the busiest shopping time of the year. For all the opportunity that Christmas creates, it does bring the challenge of fulfilling swelling customer demand. Although it may seem like a nice problem to have, in reality the scenario of supply outweighing demand could leave retailers with reams of untapped sales revenue and dissatisfied customers.

The heightened demand of Christmas puts pressure on retail businesses to process both online and in-store sales in order to provide a real-time view of stock availability and location. At such a critical time of year, retailers cannot afford to operate with systems that struggle to facilitate the increase in transactions generated by Christmas.

The scalability provisioned by the cloud gives hosted retailers an advantage over competitors as they can still function efficiently under the pressure of the Christmas shopping environment. In times of heightened demand, they simply scale up their storage capacity to capitalise on the additional trade that Christmas brings.

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In today’s retail industry, data is key. As everyone in the sector attempts to predict future trends and customer preferences in order to provide shoppers with what they want ahead of the competition, retailers can extrapolate insights from the data they hold. By using what they know about the past and present, they can prepare for new challenges.

The emphasis retailers place upon data to drive business critical decision-making has increased considerably due to the growing volumes of information available to organisations. We have witnessed a data explosion in recent times, with IBM research indicating that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past three years, predominantly due to the rapid adoption of online media. Review sites, social networks and the embracing of digital by the media has generated vast arrays of rich, qualitative data around consumer opinions, not to mention the information collated from customer website visits. Collecting this is no longer a laborious process with the automated storage of information making the creation of a data-driven retail business environment a simple procedure.

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Latest research suggests IT leaders are struggling to convince their colleagues that they can help deliver effective IT

New research into the prevalence and causes of shadow IT suggests that many CIOs are not able to deliver the innovation required by their organisations, presenting significant challenges in the development of co-ordinated IT strategies in the enterprise.

The research, conducted by Vanson Bourne, polled 200 business decision makers and found that 67 per cent had been commissioning and sourcing IT products from outside the IT department for two years or more. Furthermore, over half also felt that shadow IT activity would increase in their organisation over the next two years because it is quicker (cited by 57 per cent), that they are more likely to get the products they want (40 per cent), and that they understand their needs better than the IT department (41 per cent).

Andy Wilton, Claranet’s CIO, says: “This research suggests that large numbers of IT leaders have more work to do to align their IT departments with the needs of the wider business. Many CIOs feel tied down to just keeping the lights on and while understandable, the knock-on effect of this approach is that more business leaders are taking it upon themselves to source their own IT.

“The risk is not that people outside the IT department are having a large role in procuring IT. Indeed, individual units within an organisation have a role to play because they bring specific knowledge of their requirements. The risk is that the result will be an uncoordinated and siloed IT set-up with duplicated services and uncontrolled costs across the organisation. CIOs need to move beyond the gatekeeper function and embrace a new world, in which they are able to provide the tools and support that business unit heads need to make effective, coordinated IT decisions.”

The research follows a recent study by Deloitte that found that CIOs are twice as likely to prioritise the delivery of IT services over increasing profits, growth, and driving innovation.

Wilton concludes: “CIOs’ budgets have been put under a lot of pressure since the recession in 2008 so it is not surprising that many have had to focus on the basics. The problem is that businesses do not stand still and the consumerisation of IT has put more power into the hands of users than ever before. The good news is that IT budgets are, overall, on the increase. This will give space for IT leaders to find a new balance in their collaboration with their colleagues to innovate new solutions.”

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

The Service Level Agreement has long been the yardstick used to judge an MSPs performance. In order to do this a conventional SLA focuses on uptime and availability. However the usual MSP promise of 99.99% availability isn’t delivering all of what a customer wants.

And what does a customer want? Quite simply, they want their end users to have the best experience possible.

As businesses have come to rely more heavily on third parties to deliver their IT, and as solutions have become more complex ‘good service’ can’t simply be reduced to the pure metrics of service availability. Availability is just one of the factors that contributes to end user experience and MSPs need to do more to understand the real needs of their customers.

A provider might be meeting the levels of uptime specified by their SLA, but this will be of little solace to the CEO or FD who can’t access their emails fast enough, or the online retailer missing out on sales because of slow page-loads. In the case of accessibility problems senior execs are likely to point fingers at the IT team.

These sorts of performance-based issues have proven to be something of a bugbear for the service provider industry; a grey area that falls beyond the remit of the traditional SLA, but remains key to the overall customer experience. It is only by working together with the customer’s IT team, as partners, that these sorts of issues can be understood and ironed out.

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As multi-store chains look to provide a seamless customer experience across numerous channels and locations, retailers are increasingly turning to technology to deliver a connected, consistent service that gives the customer choice in their shopping preferences.

Solutions such as ERP, CRM and cloud hosting have been integrated into the systems of a series of nationwide retailers to collect point of sale data, show inventory availability, and solicit online purchasing patterns from remote locations on mobile devices. This all helps retailers to understand their customers, and utilise these insights to provide the products, promotions and services they want.

Due to the ever-increasing functionality that multi-chain retail-specific solutions provide, organisations rely heavily upon technology for the majority of business tasks, from enhancing supply-chain operations to taking payment for goods. Which raises the alarming question of “what if it all goes wrong?”

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Good service cannot be reduced to 99.99% availability, says Claranet

Too many managed services providers and end users are stuck in the SLA, where uptime and availability are the core metrics against which their services are evaluated. Service is far more dynamic and can change over the course of a contract meaning it is important to develop new performance objectives that are meaningful to the customer with respect to their changing business needs, says Claranet.

Paul Marland, Director of Account Management at Claranet, said:

What’s clear to us is that the vast majority of SLAs don’t really get to the heart of what’s important to customers – or, at the very least, fall short of guaranteeing what customers really need and expect, beyond uptime and availability. As businesses have come to rely more heavily on third parties to deliver their IT, and as solutions have become more complex, ‘good service’ can’t simply be reduced to the pure metrics of service availability.

“That a provider is meeting the levels of uptime specified by their SLA will be of little solace to the CEO or FD who can’t access their emails fast enough, or the online retailer missing out on sales because of slow page-loads. These performance-based issues have proven to be something of a bugbear for the service provider industry; a grey area that falls beyond the remit of the traditional SLA, but remains key to the overall customer experience,” Marland continued.

Marland went on to say that the service provider industry must look beyond measures of uptime and availability to measures of service that are meaningful to end users and contract against them.

“The industry tends to measure against technical metrics, but it’s important to remember that it’s the end user’s actual experience that counts. End users can have a situation where their SLA is being met and exceeded by their provider but are still not seeing the levels of service that their business now requires. When this happens, it is often a sign that the SLA is too generic and objectives have not been set that reflect the specific performance needs of the end user.

“The problem is that a standard SLA does not reflect the true dynamic nature of the relationship that now prevails between customer and cloud provider. The SLA is a traditional foundation for the contract, but it should not be used as the basis of how we work together.

“The best MSPs understand this and are able to assess what they do in the context of the end user. An SLA is a good baseline contractual agreement but, as the relationship evolves, so too must the level of ‘measurable’ engagement to suit the performance and optimisation criteria of each customer. MSPs need to look at those things that are actually meaningful to businesses– in essence, bringing end user performance objectives into the agreement,” he concluded.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

This blog is used with kind permission from Sift Digital, a digital partner of Claranet’s. The original blog can be found here.

I recently spoke at Claranet’s ‘Connecting your charity to the future’ seminar, hosted on floor 35 of the Shard. Nice views and a great venue for some stimulating debate around the future of digital in the not-for-profit sector.

The context for my talk was all around digital governance, which I find myself speaking about and working on most of the time these days. It’s a fascinating area, agnostic of the sector you work in. All businesses are – to greater or lesser degrees – struggling to adapt to the new digital paradigm.

The audience were an interesting blend of IT, communications and marketing professionals from a wide range of organisations. This seemed like a good starting point as one of the familiar challenges we deal with frequently is the distance and tension that often exists between IT and communications functions. This opening gambit certainly drew a telling response from the crowd, who were keen to all work more closely together but were hindered by legacy systems, processes and lack of cohesive, integrated planning.

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On Friday 26th September Claranet held the first in a series of events exploring the future of charity IT. The seminar, Connecting Your Charity to the Future, took place at the Shangri La hotel at the Shard, London.

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