Today's tough economic times are causing many businesses to look at ways to reduce costs and improve productivity to gain a competitive edge. Some of the newer VoIP PBX Solutions provide both the ability to reduce overall costs and improve business productivity. If you have an older phone system that is paid off there may be some reluctance in looking at new VoIP PBX solutions due to tight capital constraints. If you have costs for annual maintenance and moves/adds/changes on your existing phone system you may want to consider reviewing expenses and comparing them with the cost of a hosted VoIP phone solution. You may find out that the cost of a hosted VoIP phone system may be less than the cost of operating your existing phone system. You may be able to take advantage of new voice technologies such as SIP voice lines that may reduce your overall costs. If you have not taken a look at these costs and need some help in analyzing consider contacting your LightBound account manager. You may be surprised to find you can both reduce costs and improve services! Lightbound is an Indiana VoIP Provider that offers Fonality trixbox PBX that can provide productivity enhancements to help your business save money and grow. Click on the examples below to see a short video to see what it provides:
Still time to register! 11:30-1 at LightBound's Data Center
March 10th Lunch and Learn on LightBound's Hosted VoIP PBX Solutions and Fonality trixbox recent enhancement!
LightBound offers a cost effective and turnkey service for small to mid-sized businesses that offer Internet Service, Voice and Hosted Phone System.
This system is based on Fonality trixbox so as your business grows you can migrate to a dedicated PBX without lost of investment. Fonality will be adding some enhancements and will demonstrate their new version of the VoIP PBX-trixbox!
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.
LightBound, a virtual service provider, offers a hosted server solution that allows customers to save money on their server and operation costs. LightBound's hosted virtual server is monitored 24/7 by our Network Operations Center.
LightBound, a shared storage server provider, offers scalable storage to fit any business needs. Virtual storage can be purchased as-needed, so that it grows with your business. Depending on recovery time needs and the size of the storage, LightBound can customize an ideal storage solution.
So, what is cloud services? Plainly stated, cloud services is defined as "consumer and business products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet." What does that tell us about virtualization services? Nothing. in fact, you don't need virtualization services to provide cloud services, but they sure make it easier. Again, virtualization services is a function of cloud computing, which enables cloud services.
So next, I will start work on the differences between public cloud services, private cloud services, and hybrid cloud services.
In part one I identified the three types of cloud services: public, private, and hybrid. So what are the differences? Well, again all three offer virtual network services such as storage as a service, server virtualization services, and off site data backup service, among many other services. So before I can talk about the differences, I have to talk about their similar roots. Referred to as "Cloud Computing", this commonality between the different types of cloud services is the underlying deployment and delivery model, enabling Internet based real-time delivery of products, services and solutions. Thus "Cloud Computing" is the enabling of "Cloud Services", of which public, private, and hybrid are all a part.
Coming up will be the definition of cloud services as a whole, followed by the dissection of the three types of cloud services.
Today we met with one our sport teams clients in Indy and we are implementing our LightBound Storage as a Service product. We are going take advantage of our dark fiber resources and partnership with Scale Computing and Double Take to backup their physical and virtual servers to our data center in Indy and then replicate their data to our out of state data center. This will give them multiple levels of backup - first they will use Double Take to backup to the Scale Computing local SAN and then the Scale will replicate that LightBound local Scale shared storage server at our Indy data center and then we will then replicate their data again to our Scale shared storage server in our data center out state. This will give our client multiple backups of their data using our LightBound Storage as a Service products and using our LightBound Cloud Services to transport their data to our out of state data center.
Storage Area Network solutions come in many shapes and sizes, and with the advent of virtual storage, brings about a host of new capabilities which cater well to server virtualization. LightBound offers a shared storage server platform that sets it apart from its competition. Our storage as a service provides all the high performance, scalability, and dependability of the enterprise SAN at a low monthly cost. Bundled with LightBound's virtualization services, medium and small business server hosting has never been easier and more cost effective.
Not all Cloud Services are the same. There are some stark differences between one provider's virtual network services and another. At a high level, there are three commonly accepted cloud service types: Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud. All three offer virtual network services such as storage as a service, server virtualization services, and off site data backup service. In part two I will discuss this commonality and what Cloud Computing is and how it is different than Cloud Services.
Private Cloud: Cloud services operated solely for one organization. These may be managed by the organization directly or by a virtual service provider and may exist off-premise or on-premise. Considerations for private cloud are while this type of service yields minimal risk, it may not provide the scalability and agility of public cloud services.
Public Cloud: Cloud services made available to the general public. Virtual storage and hosted virtual server(s) are owned by the virtual service provider. Considerations of this type of cloud services will be discussed in a my next blog, after which I will talk about hybrid cloud services.
SIP trunking allows enterprises and small businesses to eliminate a PSTN gateway at their site and outsource that function to a carrier. It is typically a lower-cost alternative to Primary Rate Interfaces (PRIs) because SIP trunks can be purchased in single-trunk increments (as compared to 23 channel increments for a PRI). With SIP trunks, a single network can be maintained within the organization, rather than having both a voice and data network. Internet bandwidth can be used more efficiently, streamlining expenses. In addition, Moves, Adds and Changes can be completed without major wiring upgrades. These benefits all lower costs for the business.
IP trunking is a term applied to the options offered by many service providers. These are traditional phone companies and others such as cable companies and new entrants referred to as Internet Telephony Service Providers or ITSPs. These service providers accept VoIP traffic over the Public Internet or private connections which they then place on the telephony network to reach residential and business customers. Inbound calls are received at the service provider central office and then sent over the Internet to the intended recipient, again using VoIP as the transport medium.
With the recent affordability of large Ethernet circuits, services are more affordable to transport over that same circuit. LightBound is able to provide VoIP, Internet access, off site data backup service, and virtual network services over the same circuit, whereas in the past most customers would use several smaller circuits to achieve the same solution.
Cloud services offer the latest in virtual network services. LightBound offers Storage Area Network solutions with a secure facility and redundant backups.
For companys wanting to make full use of their installed IP-PBXs and not only communicate over IP within the enterprise, but also outside the enterprise a SIP trunk provided by an Internet Telephony Service Provider to connect to the traditional PSTN network is the solution. Unlike in traditional telephony, where bundles of physical wires were once delivered from the service provider to a business, a SIP trunk allows a company to replace these traditional fixed PSTN lines with PSTN connectivity via a SIP trunking service provider on the Internet.
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 offers Managed Servers Hosting as do several other Indiana Server Hosting companies. Why choose LightBound over others? See below for a few reasons:
1) LightBound has been supporting IP services since the mid-90's through their ISP service and has a fully redundant, high capacity Internet connection directly connected to the NAP, peeering with Equinix packet exchange. LightBound also has four connections to top tier Internet providers at the NAP so Internet service is going to be rock solid high speed internet in Indiana. LightBound has total control and visibility of it's Internet upstream connectivity. other providers may have several connections to ISP's. LightBound IS the ISP for managed servers hosting.
2) LightBound provides a flexible, customized server hosting rather than just a few options. You can choose bare-metal and work with your internal IT staff or IT consulting firm to provide OS, development or application platform, or LightBound can provide all these services.
3) LightBound deploys security technologies at the VM level to secure your managed server from other environments. This has been designed to satisfy compliance regulations. This provides the most cost effective model for the customer versus dedicating server blade in a chassis to each customer.
4) LightBound has Data Disaster Recover/Business Continuity service to provde computer and phone directly for your internal staff to get to managed hosting services with 32 seats ready to go and capacility for up to 60 workstations. No worrying about a third party to deliver this service.
5) LightBound has 19 telecommunication carriers with facilities in the data center. If your business has multiple branches and terminates circuits in the data center to get to the managed servers cost efficienciences can be realized by choosing from the manay carriers to get the best cost.
Are you looking for High Speed Internet in Indiana for your Server Collocation and Managed Servers Hosting? LightBound can take care of this for your business. Our Internet is not like the DSL or Cable Internet offering that you get at your home. We have a 24 x 7 x 365 data center NOC staffed around the clock.We are a top tier business Internet provider with direct links to the NAP in Chicago and Ashburn, VA with direct peering connection with Equinix packet exchange.Through this the server is one hop away from Internal networks at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and hundreds of others. We have two 2.5GB connections to the NAP, and each connection has two 1 GB upstream (for redundancy) to top Internet carriers.Our 2.5 GB connection to Chicago is also redundant with a diverse path.We have very large customers with high availability requirements so we have architected this network for premium service.That being said our pricing is not the cheapest, but we deliver the best value for your business, especially is your rely on High Speed Internet in Indiana.
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