Outsourced data centres
Maintaining a physical and operational environment appropriate for high availability isn't easy, and it isn't cheap. Even if you don't want to outsource your IT requirements completely, it may be worth considering an outsourced operations centre.
"We offer 99.9 percent availability at 70 percent of the cost of doing it in-house," says managing director Craig Allen. "What's more, service levels are part of the contract and if they're not met, the customer doesn't pay."
Virtual Offis' data centre is a utility-grade facility created for failed pay-TV operator Galaxy. The data centre has six high-speed connections to its backbone network.
Part of the story comes from economies of scale. Virtual Offis can afford high-quality infrastructure because the cost is spread over many customers. For example, its AU$60,000 investment in redundant firewalls represents a few hundred dollars per server. The same applies to routers, antivirus measures, automated backup, a tertiary domain name server, and so on.
In terms of the ability to communicate with the outside world, Virtual Offis claims an impressive figure of 21 seconds planned and unplanned downtime in 18 months.
At least one of the systems in the facility has been running non-stop during that period, and the only reason it was rebooted that long ago was after a software upgrade.
Apart from providing the right environment and infrastructure, the company chooses high-quality hardware for customer systems and ensures sufficient stocks of spare machines and parts are on hand to meet a 60-minute recovery guarantee. "We get very good prices," says Allen.
Virtual Offis uses IBM Director to monitor the operation of customers' systems. Apart from predicting component failure before it occurs, this also allows the detection of increasing server loads so customers can be advised of potential problems.
The company also takes care of the tedious side of server administration such as keeping all the clocks synchronised and applying operating system patches promptly (but without rushing into anything); things that may be overlooked by harried in-house administrators but are essential for reliable and secure operation.
If disaster should strike the centre, Virtual Offis has a standby data centre on Sydney's North Shore. This site is partially populated--some customers have chosen extended service and operate from both sites to guarantee availability, but few think it is worth the extra cost, says Allen.
Agreements with distributors are in place to ensure equipment can be transferred from their warehouses directly to the standby centre when necessary. For worst-case scenarios, mutual support relationships have been forged with other hosting providers to provide each other with rack space in emergencies.
"In essence, we are a virtual operations department," says Allen.
