White Paper: 4 Factors To Consider With Colocation

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Colo WP ThumbnailThe global colocation market will see a compound annual growth rate of 12.4 percent through 2020, so if you are doing your research on colocation providers, you’re in good company. For a growing number of businesses, colocation provides a lot of benefits:

  • Easy upgrade from an on-site “server room” into a professional data center
  • Reduced initial and ongoing expense to build, power, cool and backup an on-site data center
  • Support from professionals in managing maintenance and upgrades
  • Backup of critical data for disaster recovery efforts

Learn how to make a business case for colocation. Get info on how to select a colocation provider, including questions to ask for businesses subject to compliance regulations. ISG is SSAE 16 Type 2 SOC 2 audited for security, availability, privacy, processing and performance.

White Paper: Tech For Community Banks

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community-banksIn the face of regulatory changes and cybersecurity threats, IT plays a more critical role than ever for community banks. This free report will teach you how to not just survive, but how to thrive, with technology as a main driver. Topics covered include:

  • Key trends in regulation and market forces driving change
  • How video conferencing can improve the client experience
  • The latest developments in cybersecurity and what you need to prepare
  • Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: are you ready?

Video: Bringing IT All Together

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Click this fun animation to see how ISG supports IT teams with managed services and infrastructure solutions. Our experts help you manage innovation projects such as shared storage, virtualization, disaster recovery, security, mobility and UC collaboration projects.





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Disaster Recovery

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When creating your disaster recovery plan, it’s all about expecting the unexpected. In order to rest easy that your disaster recovery and business continuity plans are secure, you need to make sure you have all your bases covered and are not cutting corners now that can cost you greatly later on! In the infographic below, we walk through how to prepare your disaster recovery plan and how the cloud plays a role in your plan creation.

disaster-recovery




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Bank Improves Operations with WAN Optimization

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Industry: Financial

When a St. Louis area bank needed help with a sluggish WAN, they turned to ISG for help. When the lines at Midwest BankCentre started to grow unusually long due to a sluggish network and unresponsive business applications, Larry Albrecht, senior vice president of operations, thought he knew the answer—a new T1 connection.

“We’re a midsize community bank here in the St. Louis area,” said Albrecht. “We do not have a large IT staff. So, when we need help with our technology we typically turn to an outside provider.”

Because Albrecht had already established a good working relationship with ISG Technology, he brought his network bandwidth issues to them for help. “When Larry first contacted us about his problem he was sure that they needed to add a new T1 line,” said Shanon Lightle, account executive at ISG. “I asked him if he would allow us to run an assessment of his network first to determine what his exact problems were before he invested in a new T1 connection. Thankfully, he said ‘yes.’”

With Albrecht’s blessing, a senior network engineer with ISG installed a PacketShaper from Blue Coat to assess their network performance issues. What ISG discovered was eye-opening.

Challenge

“The basic problem was that we had limited to no visibility, or control of our network,” Albrecht said. “But bandwidth wasn’t our biggest problem.”

The PacketShaper that ISG installed also provided them with a granular level of insight into the bank’s Internet usage during business hours. That’s where they discovered two things. “First, we discovered that a portion of our problem was caused by employees checking their Gmail, updating Facebook and watching YouTube videos, bogging down what bandwidth we had available.” said Albrecht. But this wasn’t their biggest challenge.

“Not only was our connection to corporate email and file sharing running slow,” he said, “but our business application that supports our client account creation and modification was practically unusable, causing updates to client accounts to take, on average, about 15 minutes.” These two issues combined to create long lines at the bank counter and a lot of unhappy clients.

Solution

In response to these concerns, ISG installed a Blue Coat Mach5 WAN Optimization solution, which allowed Albrecht’s staff to drastically reduce the size of their business data and file transfers, and increase their bandwidth by 90 percent.

In addition, files and applications that previously required more than 15 minutes to open and update were now responding in fewer than 60 seconds. ISG also deployed a Blue Coat PacketShaper to allow Albrecht and staff to begin shaping their recreational traffic and set maximum thresholds giving priority to business applications. The business results were dramatic. Lines got smaller. Clients smiled more often, and employees at the bank got their work done faster and with less stress. Albrecht was pleased.

“We talked to a couple of different IT service providers about our need for a better solution to our bandwidth problem,” he said, “but we went with ISG primarily because we were comfortable with what we’d experienced with them in the past.”

Results

As happy as Albrecht is with the results, he’s quick to admit that the project had its share of road bumps along the way. “I’ll be real honest, we ran into a few snags with this, when our NetApp SAN application encountered some issues. But ISG was quick to involve NetApp’s engineering team to address that problem,” said Albrecht. “It was gratifying to know that ISG’s relationship with the vendor allowed them to get such a quick response to our problem. ISG did a very good job of jumping on the issues and dealing with frustrations as we encountered them.”

Thanks to ISG’s assessment of the bank’s network, Midwest was able to increase client satisfaction, address their bandwidth issues, and optimize their business applications to improve responsiveness and regain control of their network.

“What I like about ISG is that they’re not a large, anonymous company,” said Albrecht, “and when I call them I’m not talking to an operator in an enormous call center who creates a trouble ticket and maybe calls us back in a few days. Instead, I know that ISG will take my call and respond quickly. They’re very consistent and they’ve shown great interest in establishing a long-term working relationship with our business.”

If you’d like to talk to someone at ISG Technology, Inc. about how they can help your business improve efficiency and address network issues like these, please feel free to call (877) 334-4474 or visit them online at www.isgtech.com.

Solving Disaster Recovery with Virtualization

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Industry: Education

Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) is a K-12 school district in central Oklahoma. OKCPS is comprised of 79 total schools, over 36,000 students and more than 4,400 employees.

Challenge

Like many large public school systems, OKCPS had various IT challenges. Dozens of sites to network, thousands of endpoints to support and limited IT staff to manage and maintain the sprawling environment. Worries about power consumption, server sprawl and the high travel/maintenance costs of supporting a distributed server environment had increased as well.

Solution

OKCPS has an experienced and talented Network Services team but they felt needed a technology partner with deep expertise in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solutions. OKCPS engaged ISG Technology, a technology solution provider with extensive experience helping clients solve BC/DR challenges.

As a starting point, ISG worked with the Network Services team to perform a detailed Assessment of the OKCPS server, storage and network infrastructure. The Assessment yielded a solution design which would not only solve the DR challenge but consolidate the sprawling OKCPS infrastructure down to working data centers. The two data centers could then be configured to work together in production while providing failover capabilities in the event of a site failure.

The design included virtualization of numerous OKCPS server workloads using VMware ESX on HP C-class Blades. Once virtualized, workloads become “portable,” since virtual machines are not tied to physical hardware.

The design also included a pair of EMC CLARiiON storage arrays teamed with EMC RecoverPoint for bi-directional data replication between the two data centers. Replication assures that if one data center has an outage, data loss, or disaster the other data center can assume full function.

To simplify the recovery process, ISG recommended VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), a DR tool for virtualized environments which leverages EMC replication capabilities to automate the flow of the recovery process. SRM eliminates complex manual recovery steps and minimized the need for human intervention during a disaster — effectively a “push button” DR solution. SRM also provides a non-disruptive testing environment, so the plan can be validated and/or amended as necessary.

The final solution component was for Backup at each site using Data Domain appliances to provide an additional layer of data protection. Data Domain is a tapeless backup solution which provides industry leading data “deduplication” which can dramatically decrease storage capacity requirements and costs.

Results

Implementation of the solution went smoothly, according to Steve Washam, Director of Network Services for OKCPS. “The project went very well. Our team did a great job. Dean Coit (ISG Solution Architect) went above and beyond the call of duty to help us.”

“ISG’s expertise was critical to our success.”

Steve Washam, Director of Network Services for OKCPS

The key result achieved was a robust DR plan which can be tested, amended and validated during business hours without having to take down production systems. The new DR plan also provides detailed test reports which can be provided to auditors upon request.

Another notable benefit of the solution was a significant reduction in power consumption and energy costs. Prior to implementation, OKCPS had reached the capacity limits of the existing power plant. But the virtualized environment reduced power requirements and eliminated the need to invest in a new, larger UPS.

A final benefit resulted from the consolidation and centralization. The bloated travel and maintenance costs of supporting the former distributed environment were all but eliminated in the new solution.

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Colocation: Having your cake and eating it, too (Part 2 of 2)

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In our previous article in this series, we discussed the many benefits of colocation. While there are obviously many advantages to this service, some businesses are better suited for a colocation package than others. There are a lot of factors to consider before implementing such a plan. Chief among them is to fully understand what your company is and what it will be. How much storage space do you currently require? Do you see massive growth in your organization’s future? What are your capital expenditure and operational expenditure requirements for data storage?

These aren’t easy questions to answer, but they are absolutely vital in understanding whether or not colocation is right for your business. So, with that in mind, which companies should be looking into colocation?

Colocation has benefits across multiple organizations. Many different kinds of businesses can benefit from off-premises data storage.

Who benefits the most?

While we’ve already discussed the cost advantages of colocation, reduced capital expenditures are something just about any company could benefit from. Colocation has advantages for businesses of all sizes, but it truly excels for smaller companies or organizations that are predicting a lot of growth in their business. This is because colocation works wonders when it comes to scalability.

When your business grows, your data needs grow with it. While you obviously want your operation to continue to develop and mature, handling these increased data storage requirements can be incredibly hard to handle. In past years, scaling up generally meant having to requisition more and more space for your servers. If your business was still in its infancy or your facility just didn’t have a lot of space, this was a lot easier said than done.

With a colocation package from a managed service provider, the sky’s the limit in terms of your data needs. Scaling up simply requires the purchase of new hardware as well as a renegotiation of your terms. Never again will you have to worry about where you’ll put yet another server.

What should you be looking for in a colocation partner?

You’ve taken a hard look at the data and scalability requirements of your facility and have decided that colocation is right for you. Now it’s time to search for a provider that can give your company what it needs. When it comes to selecting a partner, there are a few requirements every business owner should be aware of.

First and foremost, you should do research into what kind of surveillance you can expect from this provider. Will your data systems be monitored at all times by a fully-functioning staff? If so, how knowledgeable are these employees, and will they be easily reached in the event of a late-night IT issue? On top of that, you need to know if the facility has backup generators in the event of a power failure.

“40 percent of small businesses close permanently after a natural disaster.”

Aside from these concerns, another area you should focus on is the MSP’s involvement in disaster recovery. Harvey Betan, a business continuity consultant, stated in a TechTarget article that colocation facilities work well as a backup disaster recovery location, as they are generally meant to be far away from your building. Considering the Red Cross has reported that nearly 40 percent of small businesses close permanently after a natural disaster, having your data in a separate location could prove incredibly useful.

Thankfully, ISG Technology has the ability to facilitate all of these needs and more. After years of experience in the disaster recovery business, ISG Technology can help ensure the safety of your data. What’s more, we guarantee 24/7/365 monitoring of the data systems within our facility, and our backup generators help to ensure you can access your data when you need it most.

Colocation: Having your cake and eating it too (Part 1 of 2)

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With all of the information collected as a normal course of conducting business these days, it’s not surprising so many companies are beginning to focus more heavily on their data storage needs. Keeping things in line used to mean having a properly labeled file cabinet, but client information has evolved well beyond this.

As a solution to storage woes, many companies are beginning to lean toward colocation. This is where a business takes its own servers and stores them at an outside data center. Once the servers have been transported, the facility’s staff take care of requirements such as cooling and bandwidth. The popularity of this service has been exploding recently, and MarketsandMarkets has predicted the global colocation market to be hit more than $54 billion by 2020.

Colocation is an amazing innovation, so let’s take some time to discuss the advantages of this service in depth:

Colocation has a lot of benefits. Colocation just makes sense for many businesses.

Advantages you can expect

As touched on above, one of the biggest reasons companies make the switch is that they don’t have the ability to actually care for their servers. Whether it’s a concern about not having the proper staff to care for the machines or even just not having the physical space, colocation allows companies the unique opportunity to utilize data center services without actually building one themselves. CAPEX and OPEX costs such as these are severely reduced when implementing a colocation solution, allowing business administrators a little more breathing room in their budgets.

On top of receiving services like server cooling and power without directly having to pay for them on premises, companies that purchase a colocation plan are also likely guaranteed certain conditions under their service-level agreement. According to TechTarget’s Margaret Rouse, an SLA may include anything from uptime guarantees to performance benchmarks.

“Data is at the center of your business.”

Another amazing benefit of colocation is that the managed service providers within the data centers often also offer disaster recovery solutions. While this is certainly a great addition to a colocation package, it also means that a facility that provides disaster recovery is most likely safer than any other company you’ve ever dealt with. These professionals are experts at mitigating the risks of a disaster, which means your servers will be incredibly secure in their hands. Data is at the center of your business, and making sure that it’s safe should be your top priority.

ISG Technology can help you implement a solution

If you’re thinking of taking advantage of this amazing innovation, there’s been no better time than now. ISG Technology is a leading colocation expert, with years of experience satisfying the data storage needs of our clients. Even a single server can be relocated to an ISG Technology facility, making this service right for businesses of multiple sizes.

Although colocation has quite a lot of advantages, certain companies can benefit more than others by implementing such a solution. In the second part of this series, we’ll delve more deeply into which organizations can expect the most out this service.