Scale Computing’s N05 StorageNodes are a unified clustered architecture of both SAN and NAS arrays delivering enterprise features at an affordable price for the SMB market.
The N05 is the ideal solution for entry-level storage. With 2- 500 GB SATA disk drives, a single node stores .5 TB (1TB Raw) and has capacity to grow into the petabyte range. The N05 StorageNodes can also be mixed and matched with Scale’s S-Series StorageNodes, delivering a flexible, scalable solution for your growing storage needs. To add capacity, simply add nodes to the system. Data is automatically striped and mirrored across the cluster delivering migrationless scaling
The N05 includes enterprise-level features at no additional cost and is a true all-in-one solution at an affordable price.
Enterprise-Level Features included:
* Snapshots
* Replication
* Thin Provisioning
* Storage Pooling
* Operates with NFS/CFS/iSCSI
* No single point of failure
Intelligent Clustered Storage
All of Scale Storage Nodes’ are built on Scale’s own ICS Technology, which reduce your costs, add convenience and increase control over your storage needs.
Increase Control
ICS is a true scale-out architecture. It uses software to create a global name space across all nodes in the cluster, thus creating a single cluster with virtually unlimited scalability. The N05 StorageNode allows scalability by as little .5TB per node at a time. Prevent underutilization and over- provisioning by purchasing only the amount of storage you need when you need it. Additionally, ICS contains its own block replication system. Each node contains the information necessary to access all data blocks simultaneously and can assume responsibility for any other node in the entire cluster, providing transparent fault tolerance at all times.
Reduce Costs
All Scale Computing StorageNodes include features and software expected for enterprise-level storage. The N05 Series provides the capacity needed for small-to-midsize businesses without sacrificing features. It is also compatible with the S-Series as a need for larger capacity presents itself. Additionally, unlike controller-based systems that typically are programmed to read only nodes of a particular density, Scale’s ICS can accept nodes of multiple densities to the cluster. Nodes purchased today will work with nodes purchased in the future, making the nodes future proof.
Please make sure to keep on calendar LightBound's next Lunch and Learn in September 2010. Topic will be Scale Computing along with LightBound's ability to do Scale to Scale Replication.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed servers hosting, Shared Storage server, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound is also expanding. Be on the lookout for our new state of the art 47,000 sq ft. Data Center coming out of the ground and available for occupancy in first or second quarter of 2011.
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound is your Fonality Authorized Reseller for trixBox Pro Editions for VoIP PBXsolutions both hosted and premise based IP Based Telephony.
www.lightbound.net
Fonality is updating its software to Version 5. Here are some of the highlights. Please contact me with questions.
Back end is now Asterisk 1.6 – this means a faster, more efficient call processing engine that can take advantage of newer multi-core and multi-threaded processors. In addition, there are new codecs available to us that open up a lot of opportunities for future enhancements.
Extensions / users:
Users – we realized at Fonality that more and more often, users have multiple extensions, so now, rather than having an extension assigned to a user, we have users who have one or more extensions assigned to them. This allows us to do some more interesting things in HUD and creates a more cost effective way for a user to have multiple extensions.
Add user wizard – because of the new user based model, we now have a wizard for adding extensions. This allows you to (list out options).
Extension Status – FONscore
Fonality Professional and Enterprise – pick and choose your version
Toll restriction – The ability to only allow certain dial plans to be dialed by certain users.
ACD improvements:
Queue autofill – rather than one call being distributed to an agent at a time, we can now pass calls to agents as they come into the queue, completely bypassing any music on hold if an agent is available.
Queue priority – The ability to prioritize one queue over another. This allows you to set up 'priority’ queues for special customers.
TTA SLA – How many calls were answered within X number of seconds?
Reasons – You can now create reasons for your agents that they have to choose when logging out of the queue. These can now be reported on.
ACD reports – new reports: Reason reports, SLA reports, export to CSV
Other CP stuff
Call quality reports
Phone settings – download config via LAN or via Internet
Enable firewall
HUD
New supported OS’s – Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Windows 7
Linked HUD is here! Allows you to see call status, barge/monitor, view and join conference rooms, retrieve parked calls, add linked extensions to a queue, etc.
New permission to block chat on a per user basis.
HUDdy list – shows the people you talk to most often
Location settings – set your location
Transfer from on hold to another extension or voicemail box
Agent log out reasons
Agent per queue logout
Whisper
Notification when being barged or recorded
Permanent agent different icon
Readable server-side chat log
Format.xml – stored server side, and allows for custom modification of dialing preferences and caller ID display
HUD Queues
New queue stats: TTL SLA, Duration, Idle, Calls, Avg talk time
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound is your Fonality Authorized Reseller for trixBox Pro Editions for VoIP PBX solutions both hosted and premise based IP Based Telephony with Enterprise, Call Center and UAE (SalesForce and SugarCRM integration) editions.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed servers hosting, Shared Storage server, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound is also expanding. Be on the lookout for our new state of the art 47,000 sq ft. Data Center coming out of the ground and available for occupancy in first or second quarter of 2011.
www.lightbound.net
Check it out on you tube LightBound's newest a commercial showing our data center,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JxBZCCZuv8
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound is your Fonality Authorized Reseller for trixBox Pro Editions for VoIP PBX solutions both hosted and premise based IP Based Telephony with Enterprise, Call Center and UAE (SalesForce and SugarCRM integration) editions.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed servers hosting, Shared Storage server, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound is also expanding. Be on the lookout for our new state of the art 47,000 sq ft. Data Center coming out of the ground and available for occupancy in first or second quarter of 2011.
www.lightbound.net
While many people consider VMware to be a company that services the enterprise, the majority of our business, as much as 80 percent, comes from the SMB market and you, our partners, are the key driver into this important segment. As virtualization adoption continues to expand rapidly in the SMB space, VMware has taken steps to ensure partners servicing the SMBs have lucrative opportunities in a big growth market.
The SMB market is perhaps the most exciting and opportunistic in virtualization today, as the sector constantly looks for cost-saving solutions and VMware continues to provide virtualization packages that are affordable and robust. More and more SMBs are looking to the scalability and affordability of cloud, but may not realize that virtualization provides them with the best path to the cloud along with added benefits like consolidation, management, and automation of routine, time consuming tasks. We are also seeing that after the recession, more SMBs are considering the lifecycle savings of virtualization and see adoption and implementation of virtualization as a strategic business objective.
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound is your Fonality Authorized Reseller for trixBox Pro Editions for VoIP PBXsolutions both hosted and premise based IP Based Telephony.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
To build on VMware’s SMB offerings, we are excited to announce today a new promotion for SMBs looking for the most cost-effective and comprehensive virtualization solution on the market – the new vSphere Essentials Plus with vMotion. For SMBs with less than 20 servers, vSphere Essentials Plus provides a proven, reliable, industry leading virtualization solution. With vMotion, SMBs can now migrate VMs between physical servers with no impact to end-users – ensuring that applications have higher availability and the testing and deployment of apps is safe and seamless.
In this day and age where everyone depends so heavily on Technology. Isn't good to have one company that can provide ITManaged Services, Server Collocation, Web Hosting Services, Virtual Storage, Storage as a Services, VoIP PBX Solutions, Hosted VoIP PBX Solutions, Voice Services and Data Services.
LightBound can provide your Cloud Services, Data Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity to your Voice and Data services including Off Site Data Backup Services.
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound offers virtual storage and hosted virtual servers.
LightBound can combine managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require, regardless of their technical expertise.
I spoke with a potential customer this week who is interested in hosting SQL, Sharepoint, and smart mail servers at our data center using the LightBound Virtualization services. Initially they were interested in only managed server hosting, but realized the hardware cost and maintenance would be a challenge to maintain. I was able to provide a solution using our virtualization and cloud services that would meet both his performance and budgetary needs.
Cloud services providers offer hosted virtual servers and they can also offer Storage as a Service. At LightBound we offer both. A customer can opt only for storage as a service, and to this can add server virtualization services. There are two technologies we leverage to maximize cost savings, which we in turn pass on to the customer - thin provisioning and tiered storage.
Definition: A LUN (Logical Unit Number) is a single storage unit on a SAN (Storage Area Network), mapped to a server which then corresponds to a hard drive letter, like C:.
Thin provisioning is the ability to leverage available storage space from the total "pool" of storage, regardless of the number and size of LUN's. In other words, it's over subscription. The space isn't consumed when the LUN is created, but when it's actually used. So you can create twenty 1TB LUNS on your 10TB SAN, and as long as the aggregate consumption across all 20 LUNS is less than 10TB, all is well.
At LightBound we investigated how we might provide this cost savings garnered from thin provisioning directly to the customer. We found, however that for a number of reasons, it just wasn't going to be practical. First off it's a billing nightmare - customers want many things, and one of those is a consistent bill. To charge only for the actual usage would mean a substantially higher cost per "consumed" gigabyte to cover our costs, and every month an analysis of the consumed disk would have to be reported on for accurate billing. Also, how do you determine a months usage if the data ebbs and flows through the month? Maybe 95 percentile, or prorated down to the day, but again, a huge billing ordeal and often an inconsistent and potentially an unexpectedly high bill to the customer.
What we did instead was to take consideration of the average LUN usage (about 75%), and provide that cost savings to the customer. This provided for a competitive price point for disk, and a consistent and simple bill for the customer. But wait there's more - we actually figured out a way to allow the customer to leverage that extra space - snapshots.
Almost all customers utilizing storage area network solutions, including those paying for storage as a service, want to utilize snapshots. Snapshots provide point-in-time recovery capabilities of the critical data. Snapshots are freezing the data, and storing the changes (or deltas) in a different container. Thus even though the data isn't being copied, there is some consumption attributed to these snapshots. Thus the cost of snapshots is not in the number of snapshots, per say, but in the amount of disk space they consume. So here's the cost savings, and I'll apologize up front that it's a little complex, so bear with me. The customer can leverage the space they have not [yet] consumed in their LUN towards snapshot space. Here's an example:
Let's say a customer knows that they will have about 750GB of data, so they lease a 1TB LUN. Why not lease 750GB you ask? Because most operating systems don't react very well when their drive is completely full. You need to instill a little wiggle room, so 1TB it is. Now we invoke the snapshot retention schedule, which is what determines when and how often a snapshot is taken, and how long to retain that snapshot. So let's assume for the sake of discussion that we end up taking and retaining snapshots that total 200GB in disk consumption. The customer bought 1TB, used 750GB, and used another 200GB for snaps. That's only 950GB, less than 1TB, and so less than what the customer paid for. Voila! The customer doesn't have to pay for the snapshot consumption. Now, if the total of the two (data & snaps) exceeds the initial total allotment, then they're some fees, but not until then. So use that extra "wiggle room" for something fruitful like snapshots and in doing so you don't lose your wiggle room!
This was a long one, so I'll save tiered storage for next time.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
One of the most important aspects of Cloud Services that will greatly contribute to its market adoption and growth is the removal of the complexities. Companies of all shapes and sizes, most not offering a technical product or service, are simply not interested in Storage Area Network Solutions, Hosted Virtual Servers, or Virtual Storage. What they're interested in is bringing their products and services to market in the simplest most seamless means possible. Enterprises have always cringed at not only the costs of ever growing data centers, but also all the complexities attributed to every request made of their IT department. I'm not saying that IT is made up entirely of a bunch of naysayers, although there's a few out there (you know who you are). There have been many times in my career when I've had to clarify that I'm not making it complex, it is complex. But Cloud Services, or more specifically Software as a Service, is going to help simplify the process of providing to business units, and yes even end users, the services that they need without complexities involved in the underlying infrastructure.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
LightBound will be doing a Lunch and Learn on June 16th at 731 W. Henry Street. Come see the new evolution in VoIP PBX solutions and how LightBound is adding Hosted VoIP PBX solution to our stable of Cloud Serves including Virtual Servers, Virtual Storage, Managed Services.
We will be doing a live demostration of our Hosted VoIP PBX solutions and how if can make your organization more productive.
LightBound has been the leader in Indiana Internet Services since the early 90's.
Look forward to seeing you at our demo of Hosted Voip PBX Services.
Historically, ergo back in the days of physical servers, I often commented that Disaster Recovery in preparation of Business Continuity is much like a dog chasing its tail. Server Collocation was often employed to have backup servers at a remote location. Well, congratulations - you've just doubled your workload, not to mention increases your costs, possibly more than two-fold. So here's where I say welcome virtualization services and cloud services! Storage Area Network Solutions (SAN's) paved the way for multiple server hosts to be able to easily and seamlessly share storage, and with boot from SAN technology, you can now replicate the data, including OS and App, to another location at the block level. No muss, no fuss. No more having to manage an entire mirror of your server infrastructure. No more installing every patch twice, no more having to upgrade your applications to the next version twice. No more having to troubleshoot twice. No more having to pay for the number of licenses you need- what? You guessed it...TWICE! Good news.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
Another reason Cloud Services is so attractive is that it leverages Server Virtualization Services and Virtual Network Services. The concept is simple: In physical legacy infrastructures the hardware is available only to or what I like to call "married to" the software. In a virtual environment utilizing shared storage, servers (or hosts) are pooled together and the software is virtually mapped to the pool of virtual storage and server hosts. If a host is lost, no problem, the virtualization services automatically and quickly remap the application to another host in the pool. And this makes Disaster Recovery preparation for Business Continuity a dream. Why? Well, I'm glad you asked! Tune in for my next blog discussing the advantages of Virtualization Services to Disaster Recovery Preparation.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
When SunPorch, the leading manufacturer of ready-to-assemble sunroom kits, needed call center capabilities it thought outsourcing was the only option. Fonality said no way! Beating bids from Avaya, Cisco and 3Com, Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center and HUD Agent improved SunPorch’s marketing and customer service programs while saving the company 100K in advertising costs. Oh yeah, it saved the day after Hurricane Ike and also paid for itself in three months.
SunPorch is the leading manufacturer of ready-to-assemble sunroom kits. To provide better customer service in its Westport Connecticut-based sales office, SunPorch needed call center capabilities that would allow calls to be routed to the appropriate person or department, and cost-effectively scale as its staff grew. SunPorch selected Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center and HUD Agent software to replace its legacy PBX system.
Outsource? No Way.
“Initially we thought that the only call center solution we could afford was to outsource to a third party,” said James McFarland, IT director at SunPorch. “With PBXtra Call Center we were able to keep our call center operations in house, which meant we could provide higher levels of customer service and maintain better control of our sales and marketing efforts.”
In addition to Fonality, SunPorch also looked at call center systems from Avaya, Cisco and 3Com. According to MacFarland, “the main driving factor for purchasing Fonality over the alternatives was essentially lower costs. PBXtra Call Center paid for itself in the first three months by eliminating the need for expensive consultants to set up and administer the system. Fonality does an awesome job of pre-configuring the system and the phones— all you have to do is plug everything in. I had the whole system up and running in less than one day.”
Saving $100K on Advertising Costs
The Fonality phone system is delivering significant value to SunPorch’s advertising programs. According to Leo Mueller, director of marketing at SunPorch, “because of Fonality, we can be much more nimble and responsive to our market. PBXtra Call Center helps us maximize the return on our advertising expenditures by reducing sales leads not associated with a lead source. We can quickly and easily assign a different phone number to each ad, which allows us to automatically record where a caller learned about SunPorch without having to ask them.”
This simple approach to tracking advertisements has returned some significant returns. SunPorch now clearly understands how specific advertisements are performing and can easily make decisions that directly impact the bottom line. “Thanks to PBXtra Call Center we’ve been able to more accurately target our advertising dollars and have reduced our annual overall expenses by $100,000,” said Mueller.
Additionally, Mueller recognizes that PBXtra Call Center has indirectly improved SunPorch’s sales program. Since the Fonality call center system has been providing the company with better data and management has been able to make more accurate and focused decisions about where to advertise, SunPorch has increased its lead acquisition by 10 percent. “It’s amazing. Even though the downturn in the economy is impacting customer purchasing decisions, we’ve still seen an increase in the number of home owners interested in our product.”
New Revenue and Better Customer Service
PBXtra Call Center has also helped SunPorch define new revenue-generating marketing campaigns, including new offerings to its existing customer base. This previously untapped group was the ideal candidate for product upgrades, but SunPorch couldn’t move forward on this type of campaign without Fonality. With PBXtra Call Center, SunPorch was able to set up specific call queues for current customer marketing programs that rang into five remote phones at its factory and then rolled over to the Connecticut headquarters when calls to the factory could not be answered. These capabilities made it possible for the company to efficiently sell to and support its most important audience.
PBXtra Call Center’s call queues have been a big help in improving SunPorch’s overall customer service. “PBXtra’s call queues and music on hold with sales voice-overs reduce the number of abandoned calls we receive. The queues let callers know how much longer they have to wait, which makes it less likely that they will hang up, and music or sales information on hold helps keep them entertained while they are waiting,” said Mueller. He has also been impressed with Fonality’s reporting matrix, which helps SunPorch monitor call center performance and adjust accordingly to improve the customer experience.
In the Wake of Hurricane Ike
Mueller gained extra appreciation for PBXtra Call Center after Hurricane Ike knocked out power to the company’s Louisville factory.
PBXtra Call Center’s unique hybrid-hosted Anywhere Management feature enabled Mueller to remotely access the call center system and record an emergency greeting in less than 10 minutes without hiring an expensive consultant. PBXtra Call Center allowed SunPorch to quickly implement a professional recording in response to the emergency, which helped maintain customer service levels and ensured calls could be redirected to the company headquarters for handling.
“The remote management of PBXtra Call Center is terrific,” said Mueller. “It gave me so much flexibility to make sure our customers were taken care of, even during a natural disaster.”
PBXtra and HUD - Essential Business Tools
In terms of its technical abilities, McFarland has been equally impressed with Fonality. “There are so many great things about our PBXtra system. The voice prompts, call queues and powerful web-based configuration are all fantastic. HUD helps us to enhance communication within the office, since we know whether someone is on the phone or not. We also like HUD’s drag-and-drop call transferring capabilities and its integration with caller ID on the PC desktop. Also, the PBXtra system easily integrated with the rest of my IT infrastructure, something I couldn’t do if I was working with a proprietary phone system.”
Mueller sums up how SunPorch feels about Fonality. “It’s simple — Fonality enables us to better serve our customers. PBXtra and HUD are essential business tools for our company — I don’t know how we lived without them.”
LightBound utilizes Fonality for both our premise based VoIP PBX solutions and our Hosted VoIP services. Our managed services can be added like Shared Storage Server, Collocation services, Cloud Services and many more that make LightBound a leader in Virtual Network Services in Indiana.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound now has a direct fiber connection to the Chase Tower in downtown Indianapolis. The direct fiber connectivy enables tenants in the building to take advantage of LightBound's suite of services such as hosted virtual server, cloud services, hosted VoIP PBX Solutions, virtual storage, and off site data backup service. Customers can connect to the fiber for $995 per month which provides a 100 MB connection to the data center bundled with 10 MB of Internet with bursting capability. Hosted VoIP PBX solutions through Fonaliy are available starting at $34.99 per seat monthly for 5 users and as the number of users increases the prices drops to $18.99 per seat for 51-99 users! If you are a business owner interested in hosted voice service check out
Fonality for Executive video. This is a great service to help with business continuity planning as customers can either host their critical IT and voice services at the LightBound data center or backup critical data to Lightbound's storage as a service platform. LightBound also has a business continuity.disaster recovery center with 32 seats each with a computer and a phone that can enable a company to minimize disruption of business operations in the event their building is not available for use. Contact your LightBound account manager for more information on this new service!
Sun Apparel and Fonality Simplify Multi-Office Communications
Offices in California and Hawaii sound like a businessperson’s dream. But for Sun Apparel, multiple offices meant expensive logistical problems when it came to phone communications. Sun Apparel turned to Fonality PBXtra for a VOIP PBX system to make three offices work as one. Since deploying PBXtra, communications are up, long distance costs are down and the company’s offices are dreamy once more.
Sun Apparel manufactures and distributes t-shirts, casual sportswear, caps and accessories throughout the western United States. With three locations — its corporate headquarters in Fullerton, CA and distribution centers in Hayward, CA and Honolulu — the company’s management understands the pain points felt by a multi-office business. That’s why improved interoffice and external communications were top of mind as the apparel company prepared to move into a new corporate headquarters location. Armed with three shiny new Fonality PBXtra servers, the company was ready to say goodbye to phone system problems.
Manageable, Open Source Telephony
As the move neared, a bid from its existing phone vendor missed the mark. “I was completely dissatisfied with the proposal from our previous phone vendor,” said Steve Gulsvig, Sun Apparel’s IT consultant. “The solution was antiquated and was going to cost almost $40,000 for just one location. It also required us to pay an expensive service fee every time we wanted to add a new employee, make a change or move an employee within the office.”
Gulsvig, an early adopter of IP phones for personal use, began searching for a new phone system that could help Sun Apparel communicate internally, as well as with customers, suppliers and other business associates. He was intrigued by open source PBX telephony but, “without a full IT department on staff, Asterisk was too much of a risk. I wanted something that ran on Asterisk, but that had a visual interface so that I didn’t have to write any code.”
A quick Google search later and Gulsvig found Fonality. “Fonality PBXtra is based on open source, but has a great user interface and a hybrid-hosted architecture that actually makes Asterisk useable — it was the clear choice for Sun Apparel,” said Gulsvig. “Fonality had a great track record and PBXtra’s price point for its extremely deep feature set was incredible.”
Fonality’s positive reputation in the IP-PBX market wasn’t the only thing that caught Gulsvig’s attention. “Deploying a PBXtra system was so simple! Since the phones come pre-configured from Fonality, we were able to get all of our locations up and running very quickly.” He was also impressed by the fact that he could easily add new long distance plans and VoIP accounts, and set up dialing rules to define when calls should use each of them.
Eliminating Inter-Office Long Distance Costs
Sun Apparel’s interdependent offices require that company managers frequently communicate about issues such as orders processed through the corporate headquarters or the amount of inventory that has been shipped to the Hawaii office. Before PBXtra, managers often wanted to quickly pick up the phone to confirm inventory or ask questions of colleagues, but avoided it because of the expensive long distance charges between the three offices. Instead, managers consulted the inventory application, which did a good job of keeping track of products and orders, but did not account for real-time changes.
That all changed when Fonality entered the picture. “With PBXtra, all calls between our offices run over our VoIP network, which has completely eliminated long distance fees between our offices. That’s a huge benefit for a company with multiple offices!” said Gulsvig. “PBxtra has also helped improve budgeting. Instead of a guessing game, our phone system is now a consistent line item every month. It makes budgeting so simple.”
Eliminating long distance fees wasn’t the only benefit specific to multi-office locations, according to Gulsvig. “PBXtra allowed us to seamlessly link together our three offices so that we operate as if we are in one physical location,” said Gulsvig. Because of PBXtra’s four-digit dialing, our managers and employees can communicate more efficiently with one another.”
Gulsvig’s overall thoughts on Fonality? “Fonality gave us 10 times the functionality of other phone systems at 10 percent of the cost. Our PBXtra system is so flexible — we can add phones, make changes or move extensions quickly and easily.”
Gulsvig is equally excited about the business results related to deploying PBXtra. “PBXtra has helped improve the relationships between our managers because it has allowed them to have constant communication and operate more fluidly. We are also able to project a more professional image to our customers and suppliers because, with PBXtra, it is so easy to upload custom messages about holiday closures, sales, etc.”
Gulsvig continues his praise of Fonality, particularly for multi-office companies. “Fonality PBXtra is a terrific product for any company that is looking for a feature rich communications system. Especially for growing businesses with multiple locations, PBXtra adds tremendous value for a minimal cost.”
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound is an Indiana VoIP provider that is now offering a complete hosted VoIP service service. If you are looking for VoIP PBX Solutions and don't want to invest a lot of up front capital this is the service that you have been looking for. A hosted VoIP service is a great part of a Business Continuity solution that can help keep your business up and running in the event of business disruption at your office. The LightBound hosted voice fits directly inthe Cloud Services model that many customers are looking for today. If you have been looking at outsourcing management of services to a provider of virtualization services, replication of critical data to a off-site virtual storage or off site data backup service, why not consider moving your phone system to a provider of hosted VoIP PBX solutions like LightBound. The service starts at 5 users and will scale up to 100 users. The hosted service uses Fonality trixBox Enterprise Edition which provides an award winning user interface, HUD, to help improve productivity. See
HUD for Employees or
HUD for Executives for all the productivity enhancement the your business can benefit from. If your organization outgrows the hosted application and you need an on premise VoIP PBX Solutions its an easy transition to a dedicated Fonality VoIP server for your business. LightBound can simplify the operations of your business by being a single source for Internet Service Indiana
Infrastructure as a Service is definitely going to become a commodity offering and with economies of scale, virtual network services will be a high volume, low margin product. Cloud Services providers are already offering Hosted Virtual Server, Storage Area Network Solutions, Off Site Data Backup Services, and even Storage as a Service combined with Server Collocation for pennies on the dollar compared to legacy physical network and server infrastructures. That being said, the leading contributor to competitive advantage in the Virtualization Services and Cloud Services market is going to be how the service is differentiated from the "commodities". What are those differentiators? Depends on the customers your targeting, including their size and type of business, their vertical, and other numerous variables. In my next blog I'll talk more about how LightBound is setting itself apart with added value beyond the base Infrastructure offering.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
Listed below are the answers to the questions I posed in Part 5 as applicable to LightBound's Shared Storage Server (s) and Hosted Virtual Server.
1. Where is the data?
All shared storage server (s) are managed within LightBound's secure datacenters in central Indiana.
2. Who owns the data?
The customer owns the data. LightBound has no rights to in any way modify, share, disseminate, or otherwise manipulate the data without the express permission of the customer.
3. Is the data backed up?
All LightBound Storage Area Network Solutions incorporate a thorough analysis with the customer to ensure that critical data is protected through backup and replication processes, aligned with the customer’s needs.
4. Can the data be extracted?
Yes, the customer is provided the means to extract their data upon request.
5. Are the data and servers volatile?
No, servers can be inactive or restarted at any time without loss of data or virtualization services.
6. Who has access to the data and servers?
Access is restrictive to only the customer and their affiliates. Unless providing managed cloud services, LightBound does not nor have access to the customers critical data.
I just read a great article about Cloud Services. Check out this
link. LightBound is a Hosted Virtual Server provider offering custom cloud services. What do I mean about in reference to custom cloud services. LightBound's cloud service offering has controls for security to meet government and industry compliance that many others don't offer. If you are looking for some more details on Virtualization Services that LightBound offers come to our Lunch and Learn on April 14, 2010 to find out more. You can register at
LightBound's web site. We also offer server collocation if you want to bring in your own equipment.
If you have a Compellent or Scale SAN and desire to replicate for business continuity or data disaster recover LightBound offers Storage as a Service to meet your needs. LightBound can be the one stop shop to accommodate as we have Indiana WAN services with multiple carriers to provide a large circuit directly from your office to our data center to provide backup needs. A large circuit is generally needed as 100 GB takes 2.2 hours to replicate your SAN. If you have a SAN with another manufacturer and would like off site data backup service you can use a backup application to a NFS or CIFS share to back up remotely. If you need to also need a server platform to recoer we also offer hosted virtual server platform that can be paired with replicated SAN or can be used to restore backup data. If you would like some more information plan on attending our lunch and learn in April or contact one of our account managers.
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