Indiana WAN

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.

Come hear about one of the most exciting stories in the technology industry in Indiana on February 10, 2010 @ 11:30 by attending LightBound's lunch and learn.   Go to www.lightbound.net to register. Scale Computing has been recognized as one of the top 20 technology companies to watch in 2010.   Scale is headquartered out of Indianapolis.  LightBound is a Scale Computing partner having deployed their solution for managed storage services for use with managed servers hosting or server collocation. The Scale solution  is a very cost effective solution for local storage (3 TB for $14K).   LightBound managed storage services can facilitate a data disaster recovery plan through a high speed WAN connection to provide off site data back service to yield a very effective business continuity plan in event of a disaster.  Come learn about what we have to offer!

LightBound, an Indiana Internet Access Service Provider offers high speed Internet unlike what most other Internet service providers can offer. LightBound peers directly with the top Internet providers in the country in order to provide a robust and redundant network with low latency.
I spoke with a customer today that is struggling with the cost of bandwidth and trying to weigh the options between a more cost-effective option versus the more costly option with higher speed. In their daily business they upload large graphic files and need to have a robust network in order to guarantee Internet access at all times, with a high upload speed. After reviewing their options they decided upon LightBound's Internet access service so that they can insure their business is constantly online and running.  
LightBound also offers business continuity, WAN configuration, and VoIP services over their high-speed network.

LightBound will be adding a third data center for server collocation before the end of the year.   This is a great site for data disaster recovery.   The new site will be at 800 Oliver Ave, and is located just South of 731 W. Henry Street.  This new data center is about 800 square feet and will have 26 cabinets.   This data center is using some new designs and technologies.  First it will be powered with a separate power feed and generator from the 731 W. Henry Street data center.  So if customers want some redundancy this will be a good option.   Flywheel UPS technology will be deployed.  This technology has advantage of being less prone to problems due to not having to maintain batteries.  Hot row containment cooling will also be used in this data center.   Cabinets are configured so there are two rows of cabinets with the back facing each other and enclosed on both ends of the row and all above with heat venting out. There front of cabinets are facing out.  This would be a great site for WAN consolidation due to access of carriers, 24 x 7 x 365 availability as well as having seasoned WAN engineers available to monitor and support.

I just finished a webinar on Fonality trixbox VoIP PBX Solutions with a K-12 education prospective customer.  There were two features that they IT director really like.   He thought the chat feature was a very usual feature built into trixbox Pro HUD.   He thought that staff could use this quick method to communicate without having to play voicemail tag.   He also liked the idea of the presence management through the HUD.  He has staff distributed in five buildings over a dispersed area and liked the ability at a glance to see who is on line, and to quickly click an icon to chat, call their land line, cell phone, or email.   Another feature he liked was managed servers hosting services that could be provided in support the solution for him.    As long as he has high speed Internet in Indiana and direct WAN connection to the LightBound data center almost all support can be provided remotely over the Internet.  In the event that on-site support is needed LightBound partners with the AME Group which can service all customers in Indiana within a 4 hour response time.   The final thing he liked was that the Fonality trixbox is about half the cost of traditional VoIP PBX providers.   With costs being tight for schools this is a great solution to consider to increase functionality at a low cost.

LightBound is one of the VoIP Service Providers in Indiana that can deliver SIP voice through dedicated WAN connections to customer sites.  The end voice service is delivered as SIP or through a gateway as digital (PRI) or analog.  LightBound also offers long distance with our VoIP offering.  Many times we get comparisons with other providers who offer long distance services at much lower costs for outbound interstate long distance calling than LightBound.   The initially looks like a much lower cost.  The catch is when customers have a lot of toll free or intrastate calling.  Typically these costs are much more than interstate calling. When all is averaged out with the competitor's different costs LightBound's long distance cost is usually very competitive.  LightBound is an Indiana PBX provider for Fonality trixbox Pro so we can provide the voice service and also all the business phone system needs.  With our long distance service we can round out a complete solution for all the voice needs.

I had a customer who recently was coordinating a renewal of a managed WAN project through us.  They had multiple contract renewal dates for 10 different locations.  They also had 5 contracts with different renewal dates.  They desired to have a single contract for all WAN locations that co terminated at the same date.   Due to contract end dates of existing contracts they asked if we could do a 39 month contract to target a start and end date for a contract to meet a renewal date in February.   We were able to do that as opposed to most carriers who are limited to 12, 24, or 36 month contracts.  The customer also wanted to minimize duplicate circuit costs to locations for the new circuits they were ordering.  Here is where we shine by being able to order the new circuits as close to the old circuit termination date and have the wiggle room to extend old circuit disconnect dates if (or most likely when) the new carrier circuits are delayed.   Why hassle with trying to coordinate all of this yourself?  LightBound's Indiana WAN consolidation service can help ease the hassle of coordinating new circuit installs, coordinating contract service dates, and monitoring and troubleshooting.  Leverage our years of experience in dealing with telecommunication carriers so you can concentrate on business applications that can make your business more profitable!

Businesses have to plan for operating in event of a disruption in business operations at their main facilities.  This planning is commonly referred to as business continuity.  Since most business rely heavily on IT it would make sense to plan on having critical resources available over the Internet.  Internet is highly available so employees can access when they are on the road traveling away from the office or working at home.  To keep the business up and running it would pay off to have your critical information backed up using  off site data backup service and using server collocation to have backup servers or primary servers   This would surely help in data disaster recovery if the primary location was every effected by a power outage, damage of equipment, or theft.  The data housed on equipment at the data center or back up service could be restored and get the business up and running at the main facility.   LightBound can be a one stop shop for business continuity needs providing WAN, Indiana Server Hosting, and Internet Service Indiana. 

Does your current PBX use a PRI circuit?   Are you on the verge of needing to add another PRI because you are at capacity for phone lines?  If so you may want to consider VoIP Service Providers that provide SIP voice circuits.  PRI  comes with 23 voice lines, but when you need the 24th you mustpurchase another PRI, and 23 more lines, even though you need only one line.  Wouldn't it be much more cost effective just to buy the single voice line?   Most SIP providers can do this, and deliver SIP to the PBX through a gateway device that connects to your to the PRI interface on the PBX. Additional cost savings can also be realized as SIP can be delivered over your data WAN, eliminating the need for separate voice network.  If you are looking for an Indiana based VoIP provider who can deliver SIP LightBound can get the job done!

I've had a few companies asking about video conferencing to help with communications in event of the H1N1 virus.  They told me that limiting interaction among branches can help with spread of the virus.   This is one strategy that can help in event of a major business disruption that effects the work population.  In order to accommodate this a solid WAN must be in place to support the video conferencing.  This can go a step further by also using VoIP PBX Solutions that can work anywhere your employees are.  This can help if they are working at home or remote locations due to sickness or weather related issues.   There are even desktop and PC based video conferencing for key managers and executives.  The key to supporting this is to make sure that each person in the company has High Speed Internet in Indiana at their homes along with a strong VPN solution to be able to conduct business communications even when the workers are not at home.  Having a plan in place where employees can get work done using IP communications is essential for business continuity as we approach the season for rougher weather and illness.

Do you want to simplify your operations for IT and Accounting Payable?  If you are using separate providers for Internet, Voice Circuits, and Data Circuit consider using a single provider for all.   IP communications has facilitated the ability to converge all three on a single network or WAN.  By dealing with one network you are removing the complexity of having to deal with multiple networks from an IT operations standpoint.  Accounting also only has to pay to one provider rather than three.   WAN providers can development a network to transport the data and voice converted to IP.  You don't have to have a VoIP PBX solutions in place to transport voice over the WAN.  Most VoIP Service Providers support SIP natively, the Voice transport over IP, but they can also provide a gateway to provider analog or digital interface to traditional phone systems.   Now instead of having a PRI circuit for voice and a T1 circuit for data you can have a single circuit for both (as long as there is enough capacity).  If you do transition to VoIP PBX Solutions and VoIP Service Providers you can reduce overall complexity in managing the communications by having a single network and also a single company to pay.

LightBound, Indiana's Internet Service Provider, offers WAN consolidation within a customers network, or by utilizing the LightBound data center.
LightBound also offer WAN Optimization products that help avoid packet delivery issues common in shared WAN environments, like MPLS and Internet VPNs. The optimization also eliminates the transfer of redundant data across the WAN by sending references instead of the actual data. The compression relies on data patterns that can be represented more efficiently and are best suited for point to point leased lines, which LightBound can provide.

I attended the Techpoint Innovation Summit '09 in Indianapolis, Indiana and Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Professor, was the keynote speaker.  He spoke about "disruption innovation" and the way that it drives innovation that upsets the apple cart for the incumbent providers of products and services.   One interesting service he pointed out was Salesforce CRM.  CRM systems typically were only affordable by large corporate entities that had large central systems and a corporate WAN to distribute access  throughout the corporation. Salesforce is a CRM system that provides enterprise level functionality, accessibility and scalability to the smallest of businesses, even a single person business, as long as they have High Speed Internet in Indiana.  Another disruptive innovation that offers enterprise level functionality, including call center capability, is Fonality Trixbox IP PBX.   Call centers typically are six figure capital investments requiring a large staff to support.   Fonality Trixbox is a VoIP PBX Solutions that can be implemented for about 20% of the cost and it integrates with Salesforce CRM.  The combination of the two can enable a start up or SMB compete with the large Fortune 500 corporation at a fraction of the cost. 

For Data Recovery Indiana consider setting up a Managed Servers Hosting at Lightbound's data center.  Many Small Business Server Hosting customers who are looking for business continuity are now setting up their backup or even their primary servers at the data center.   Lightbound provides 24 x 7 x 365 managed support with a high availability data center with power, HVAC, and security round the clock. Customer's can consolidate their data and use our Off site Data Backup Service along with Server collocation to protect their servers.  If they have a VOIP PBX solution they can move all their voice services to the data center as we are one of the few SIP Indiana VOIP providers.   Additionally centralizing WAN communications at the data center can completely provide a robust solution to keep a business up an running through most any type of weather related incident.  Look to Lightbound data center for the optimum in business continuity.

As we are out quoting projects it is constant battle with non-carriers quoting services as resellers of carriers.  They often oversell their capabilities or the carriers capabilities by setting false expectations of how services are delivered.  We often have to walk away from projects, but luckily we get second chance to re-quote after the customer discovers the quotes are incorrect. 

In other words watch out for the pretend carriers, especially in the Indiana WAN environment.  They are at least 2-3 Indiana WAN carriers that have signed up some many resellers you never know who might offer you WAN products.  Make sure they are register CLEC or ILEC.  They often represent themselves as the carrier.

So buyer beware of the who you buy your IP WAN service from.

Have you ever had a recurring problem with a WAN circuit that just wouldn't go away?  Your circuit went down and you called the carrier to report the issue and they told you there was no problem?   The problem would be fixed temporarily and then come back the next few days.   If you reply on High Speed Internet in Indiana to get your business done this can be very frustrating.  If you consolidate your WAN services in a data center with an experience NOC staff they can help solve these issues quicker.   An experienced NOC engineer will know the tricks of the trade to keep a case open to resolve the issue once and for all instead of having repeated outages.  The carrier technical support call center rep has one goal in mind - to close cases as fast as they can.  The quicker and the more cases are resolved the more they are paid.   A long standing open case costs the technical support representative so they would rather close a case than keep it open to make sure the issue is solved.   Lightbound NOC engineers have one goal in mind - to keep your circuits up and running and minimize any downtime.  They can do this 24 x7 x 365.  Does your IT support staff provide this type of service.  If not try calling Lightbound today for Indiana  WAN and Internet Service in Indiana.

Companies are all looking for ways to cut costs during these tough economic times.  VoIP Service Providers can reduce cost by selling customer exactly the voice lines they need.  If a company needs 30 voice lines typically they will purchase two PRI circuits which is 46 lines.   A VoIP Service Provider can provide this solution by delivering the exact amount of SIP trunks.  SIP trunks work best when working with a VoIP PBX solution.  Costs can be further reduced through WAN consolidation of sites that cross LATAs that result in interstate or intrastate long distance charge for calls.  If the voice services are consolidated on the LAN all calls can be made site to site at no extra cost for long distance.   If you are in the Indianapolis, Bloomington, Lafayette, Columbus, Kokomo area or counties surrounding Indianapolis you can get this servie from Lightbound, an Indiana VoIP provider that offers direct connectivity to the data center to provide quality VoIP services on a private network and local calling service.

Companies that are looking for ways to cut costs in this economy should look at consolidating voice and data WAN circuits in a data center.   The data center can now become the central hub for distributing services for Internet, Voice, and Data connectivity.  Many data centers have a large number of carriers to choose from.   Instead of using a single carrier the data center staff can help  find the best value and cost for services by using multiple carriers.   Instead of paying large fees to deliver the last mile of the circuit the customer essentially has the cost of cross connects at a fraction of the cost.   In addition to costs savings business continuity can greatly improve because a data center generally has better redundancy for power, cooling, and security.  Data disaster recovery can be enhanced by having servers at the data center that backups can be restored on or even mirrored production servers.   Data centers typically have staff available 24 x 7 x 365 that can take care of issues when normal operations support staff are not available.  In most cases problems are taken care of before a customer knows there is a problem!  Small businesses can get the same type of support as large enterprises by using managed server hosting along with WAN consolidation. With cost saving and improved reliability it make sense to consider this option. 

I ran across an interesting article about Indiana Health IT driving Economic Stimulus.   See :

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/0-0&fd=R&url=http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl%3FACCT%3D104%26STORY%3D/www/story/01-28-2009/0004961987%26EDATE%3D&cid=1298199546&ei=G4eASbD6GIbElQT254H-AQ&usg=AFQjCNG2ZTF8PbhV92mvleOLxFemAiBcTg


It's pretty interesting that Central Indiana is considered a leader in Health IT.   I think much of this has to do with the Internet Service Indiana providers that facilitate high speed broadband connectivity to many of the Health providers.   Typically in the past T1 circuits were typically used, but now 10, 100, and Gigabit Ethernet circuits are becoming common to connect health care providers.  This is necessary to due the large amount of data that medical imaging requires and access that remotely connected physicians need to access it.   Many of the medical providers in Indiana WAN are being moved to data centers to provide business continuity to facilitate always on connectivity 24x7x365.   The cost of high speed broadband in central Indiana is helping to facilitate the exchange of information to improve health information exchange.