Factors to consider when choosing a data centre provider

Simon Chamberlain speaks to the team at LDeX Group about the factors which he considers imperative when looking to choose a data centre provider.

If someone were to recommend a data centre, what would their recommendation be based on?

Most probably on whether the DC is “Tier 3″, well connected, secure, has reliable and sufficient power, and is in a suitable location. All are important considerations, however the most usual reason for choosing a DC comes down to price. As long as the usual boxes are ticked, everything comes down to which provider can provide the most cost effective solution – which is of course is perfectly reasonable.

As someone who has worked extensively with data centres over the past 15 years or so, I have found that the one thing that really differentiates them is service. Some data centres do not match up to expectations once the all important contract is signed. When it comes to getting problems resolved or connectivity provisioned they just don’t want to know or will charge you through the nose.

There are several scenarios where service becomes absolutely critical. Imagine you have a colocated server that suddenly goes offline. In no uncertain terms, this is clearly a panic stricken situation. Customers start calling, and there is severe time pressure to get to the bottom of what is going on. You might have invested in several layers of resilience and probably promised 100% uptime to your customers, but if you get hit by a DDoS attack or hacked by a disgruntled employee, then you’re a dead duck. At these critical times you need help and quickly. This is when the DC service centre really makes a difference. Can your DC really get someone in front of your cab in five minutes with a laptop and a remote login? Do they have a 24/7 NOC that can troubleshoot any connectivity issues at any complexity quickly and efficiently? Or is it going to be quicker for you to drive to the DC and try and figure out things for yourself?

You maybe thinking that critical situations are (thankfully) rare and your business can survive the odd outage. Service isn’t just about critical situations though – it’s about the day to day running of your colocation. It’s about upgrading kit, getting patch leads installed, IP transit installed. Can you send hardware to your data centre that is securely stored and then installed by a trained technician? Is there a technician who is constantly keeping you in the loop at all times? Can you get a cross-connect installed within an hour of requesting it? Does your DC provide connectivity solutions where the NOC will contact you if there is a problem, before you know one exists?

Does such a data centre even exist? Well yes it does, and it’s called LDeX . Of course, as a director of LDeX you would expect me to say that, but I can honestly say that LDeX really does deliver on this front. If you don’t believe me, talk to our customers. Having conducted a recent customer satisfaction survey, it revealed that our average score for service is 9/10, and this is the biggest reason we have such a low churn rate. It’s part of our ethos and why we are successful in a competitive market.

That’s all very well and good I hear you say, but surely most data centres have all that covered. Well unfortunately they don’t. Typically cross connects in our competitor data centres take between five and ten days to deliver. Some DCs don’t even provide remote hands, or if they do, the skill level is often questionable. Some are bogged down in process and red tape. Getting permission to do anything can take days or even weeks to sort out. This is why is it crucial to work with a data centre that provides efficient and impeccable services levels at any time of day. The really great news is LDeX also ticks all the regular boxes and is one of the best priced colo providers on the market supplemented with superior connectivity from top tier connectivity providers backed up by an onsite 24/7 NOC.

There is a really great feeling about having happy customers and that’s why we pride ourselves on our customer service.

To find out more about LDeX see www.ldex.co.uk , or get in touch on +44 (0)207 183 3959.

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LDeX Tech 60: 60 second interview with Dominic Campanaro, MD of Switch Comms

Dominic Campanaro, Managing Director of data services provider Switch Communications, speaks to the team at LDeX about his background in tech, how his company managed to become the success that it is today and his predictions about what forces IT departments will need to address in 2025.

Could you give us an insight into your background and how you got into the technology industry?

Having graduated with an honours degree in aeronautical engineering from London’s City University, I quickly realised that a career in engineering was not for me and ended up ‘falling’ into sales. Following a successful career which took me from selling photocopiers to telecoms equipment, I took the bold step of setting up my own business and Switch Communications was subsequently born.

Tell us about the company you work for?

We recognised that technology and the resources required to deliver efficient systems were changing radically and have been pioneers in developing systems and networks to help our customers improve their businesses through the use of technology. Our clients needed a trusted partner to deliver integrated managed services in the most efficient way possible. This resulted in the integration of our voice and data service capabilities and the eventual investment in the creation of a market leading core network with our very own cloud based IP platform.

In 2012, we added a cloud based hosted voice solution which increased our reach in the VoIP market. With the addition of this solution, we expanded our executive team and have gone on to become a leading name in the industry.

Switch Communications was established over two decades ago as the main reseller of Alcatel equipment. Between 1996 and 1997, the company began to expand with two asset purchases of system customer bases from Alcatel. Following this, the company acquired R&R Communications which doubled our revenues and extended Switch’s reach into Wales.

In 2003, we developed Switch IP which enabled us to enhance our offering with the delivery of WAN, VoIP and network connectivity solutions. In 2007, Switch acquired Leycom Communications which strengthened our presence in Wales and enabled us to become one of the market leaders in the region.

Apart from your own company, which other organisation do you admire the most?

I would have to say Exponential-e as it is a company which is quite similar to Switch Communications. With a core vision that IP and Ethernet is the future of networking and telecoms, the company has gone on to be extremely successful through organic growth, which is extremely rare in the industry.

What do you see as the biggest drivers of change in the datacentre market?

Application management and the explosion of end user demand for tailored services, specific to business and end user client need, have driven a massive expansion in the requirement for centralised compute resource. Whether this is private and hosted on a business’s own infrastructure or publicly sourced from a cloud software provider the reliance on distributed information sources is increasingly a major benefit and a risk to business. Interconnection between service providers and the method of delivery to the applications end user has resulted in the need to review the efficiency of the IT infrastructure supporting all the interwoven applications.

Datacentres are at the core of this change and are the most efficient method of delivering services to office sites and remote workers. As the use of applications continues to grow at an exponential rate, security concerns will be heightened making data privacy a primary concern. Datacentres are critical to this growth and the low latency performance, security and cost efficiency which they deliver are critical to the efficient use of IT services.

Where do you see the industry being in 2025?

Up in the clouds?

Seriously – probably more mobility in terms of personalised devices

With the number of devices connected to the internet expected to increase exponentially to 40 billion in 2020, IT departments need to ensure that they will have accurately forecasted the capacity and bandwidth required for hosting the growing number of applications in their datacentres. Employees expect seamless access to necessary software and enterprise resources from a variety of devices, regardless of who owns them.

As it stands, the much talked about Internet of Things has caused a frenzy amongst colocation providers with regards to the security requirements which will need to be in place to cope with the enormous amount of data which will be transferred between devices without human intervention.

More hosted solutions

I predict that more hosted solutions will be available to enterprise customers in 2025, helping them to achieve their business goals. As well as this, the market for VoIP and remote desktop will become more competitive with more vendors looking to increase their market share. Competition and price pressure will create innovation. Anyone who stands still and doesn’t listen to consumer demand will end up delivering a me-too product. We are innovators and are constantly adapting to deliver the services our customers need as their businesses evolve. Many of our deployments are bespoke and we take pleasure in delivering value specific to their needs.

Wi-Fi to be more readily available and increased take-up of cloud use in the SME market

WiFi services will be more widely available and there will be an increase in the take-up of cloud solutions, particularly from smaller vendors in the SME market.

What is the greatest challenge for an IT department today?

Keeping abreast with technological advancements

With new technologies being developed by the day, IT departments will need to ensure that staff are trained in line with these system advancements to keep up with customer expectations and requirements. As it stands, technological advancements are outpacing existing skillsets and expertise in the IT department. This is an ongoing issue which needs to be addressed. Interdependence of applications, many of them cloud based, will create increased security risks for business.

More and more companies will outsource their hosting requirements to cloud and colocation providers, which will enable in-house IT departments to focus on aligning the company’s IT strategy to the corporate vision.

With a growing mobile workforce, the company will need to continue to have processes in place to mitigate against network attacks and data loss.

Increasingly legislation and corporate responsibility for data management will increase pressure on the corporate IT department to outsource technical services to a trusted partner so that they can focus on the efficiency of their core business.

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Time is running out: LDeX Connect CTO shares his thoughts on the Internet Routing Table

Simon Chamberlain, CTO of LDeX Connect, gives his thoughts on the Internet Routing Table.

Recently, a somewhat anticipated problem, somehow managed to (ironically) creep up on the Internet Service Provider community, causing panic amongst many network engineers all over the world. The problem being that outdated infrastructure, which is still widely relied upon, ran out of sufficient memory to store the full Internet routing table. This resulted in a spike in outages leaving users unable to access Internet resources.

Despite having several years to prepare, network engineers rushed to make last minute configuration changes and performed hardware upgrades as routers and switches fell over left, right and centre. This event sparked widespread attention amongst the global media as it was the third time this century that the Internet had broken through such a threshold. The number of routes surpassed 128,000 around 2003 and 256,000 in 2008, each causing disruption for those who failed to update their networking equipment.

As the CTO of an ISP myself, it’s interesting to observe how this ‘ticking time bomb’ of a problem could have taken the Internet community by surprise. It’s almost a self-imposed denial of service attack – perhaps we should spend at least the same amount of effort as we do patching software bugs and vulnerabilities, keeping infrastructure up to date.

The Internet Routing Table

To give some insight, the Internet comprises of prefixes allocated to organisations which are subsequently distributed across the Internet using routers and switches operating Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Recently, the amount of memory required to hold all the prefixes exceeded the 512Mb threshold. This caused a problem for many legacy routers with only 512Mb of memory installed.

What took many ISPs by surprise was the fact that Cisco’s flagship Sup-720 supervisor engine (for many years) was affected, even with 1GB of RAM installed. No doubt many network managers presumed that this would be plenty and failed to give the issue a second thought. Most network support staff on the other hand, were too busy with the usual firefighting I suspect.

So, what happened?

By default, Cisco (out of the box) only allocates 512MB of the Sup-720 supervisor memory to IPV4 prefixes. 256Mb of memory is allocated to IPV6 and the rest left unallocated. In my view, it’s a simple process to reallocate memory to IPV4 with a few lines of configuration, but here’s the gotcha – the system needs rebooting. Cisco has of course advised that network operators reassign some of the memory in their routers and switches and reboot. However, when it’s 10am and your router is about to fall over, the last thing you want to do is reboot it and suffer a total outage.

Luckily for us at LDeX Connect, we reconfigured our Sup 720s memory allocation when they were installed in anticipation, but to be fair I can’t criticise any ISPs who were caught out.

It’s my belief that the Internet is a living breathing monster of a creation and very difficult to tame. Every so often, something unexpected happens that you thought you were completely prepared for and then you’re caught by surprise. Unfortunately it’s not a view often shared by Management!

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