Cost
Imagine for a moment that DR in the cloud is similar to the way you work with your residential electric company. You pay a small monthly fee for connecting your home to the utility, and then you pay for actual power usage. If you don’t draw any electricity, the small monthly fee remains; if you turn on your pool pump and your refrigerator and your lights, costs are added incrementally as you use increasingly more power. That’s a vastly different model than the way outsourced DR services have traditionally been handled, where you pay a fee commensurate with the amount of service you might need, in the event of a disaster, whether or not you ever use it. Which sounds more cost effective?
Flexibility
A great analogy here is to compare traditional outsourced DR services to your cell phone provider. To upgrade your cell phone or change your coverage model, you often have to sign up for another two years or more on a new service contract. But expanding your BC/DR service levels through the cloud gives you the freedom to reserve more or less space in a shared “container” system without dramatically impacting cost, without having to renegotiate service level agreements (SLAs), and without adding new multi-year commitments. If you’re doing DR in your own data center, or outsourcing to a third party who has reserved dedicated systems for your use only, the cost can be astronomical by comparison. In the cloud, with a shared container model, you simply reserve the space you need available to you, and make changes as your business needs dictate, usually at a very minimal cost, if any, for those changes.
Security
Today’s servers are designed for multi-tenancy use and can support different customers based on a variety of security settings, including advanced encryption methodologies to ensure the security of data in transit as well as at rest. As a result, data stored in the cloud is widely considered to be equally secure to information stored in a redundant local data center.
Design
If you have your own in-house data center, you can design your BC/DR plan and redesign it to meet changing needs, and you can conduct tests at random. Often, however, with traditional outsourced DR providers, the ability to customize your RPOs, RTOs and to conduct multiple tests throughout the year is sharply curtailed according to the parameters of your SLA. But typical DR-in-the-cloud solutions offer users an unrivaled combination of price-performance and custom design options.
Managed Recovery
Does your current DR strategy give you a “SWAT team” of IT professionals who can jump into action to kick-start your failover when disaster strikes? This is yet another reason to consider DR in the cloud. Cloud providers are accustomed to running and managing their own systems, and when you are in crisis mode, they are often able to conduct the initial restore on the customer’s behalf, getting you up and running that much faster.
Source: IT Business Edge
LightBound can help you with your virtualization services, server hosting, off site data backup service, cloud services, storage as a service, and disaster recovery needs.
One of the unique abilities of LightBound is to be able to provide and support many different services. Many clients have multiple locations and are looking for WAN area networks to connect their data and voice. Some look at MPLS, which can be very cost effective for larger companies, however small and medium size customers often feel they are little fish in a very big pond. LightBound provides a MPLS type managed network that allows us to deliver data, internet and voice to a customer bringing all the circuits back to our LightBound Data Center in Indianapolis. Many customers will get collocation space from us and put their PBX's or LightBounds Hosted PBX service, servers and firewall in rack or take advantage of LightBounds Managed Virtual Services,managed storage or replication. This lets LightBound with our redundant internet, voice and power to be the host site and have the customers sites be the remotes. This allows LightBound to provide a one stop shop for all of the customers needs and usually for less expense.
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
ANNOUNCEMENT SUMMARY:
Fonality announces trixbox Pro 5.2 release for general availability. Fonality trixbox Pro 5.2 release offers customers a number of platform updates as well as a suite of Unified Communication enhancements designed to change the way small businesses communicate.
With a unique software model approach, Fonality trixbox Pro 5.2 provides all the features of a legacy provider without the cost or complexities. It empowers the way SMB’s communicate, resulting in improved operational efficiencies, new revenue streams and enhanced customer satisfaction.
KEY Features of the 5.2 Release
User Based Licensing
Fonality trixbox Pro 5.2 has aligned to a user-centric licensing model, allowing a single employee to have up to four extensions (at no additional cost) associated with their user account. Providing ease of management within both the control panel and Fonality Heads-up-Display (HUD), the user-based licensing structure will also provide more accurate reporting metrics for managers.
Heads-up-Display (HUD) Multi-site Linking
Fonality HUD linking now permits multiple HUD servers to connect regardless of location enabling presence and enterprise chat. It leverages company-wide virtual conferencing rooms, creating a unified contact center experience.
Enterprise-grade Voice Quality Monitoring
Fonality FONscore provides a diagnostic view of your communication system and allows admins to drill into any device to see metrics like latency, jitter and packet loss for recent calls. Additionally, all quality metrics are stored in call detail records for historical investigation.
Upgraded Platform Core
Release 5.2 of Fonality trixbox Pro contains an upgraded platform allowing for multi-core and multi-threaded processors. This flexible communication system is now more responsive, can operate faster, and can increase your company’s concurrent calling capacity.
Enhanced Contact Center Feature Set
With Fonality trixbox Pro Call Center Edition you can enhance the suite of call center features already at your disposal. 5.2 improves upon power external reporting health checks that allow you to remain with your SLA metrics including such reports as, time to answer, average call length, agent log off reason codes and additional call center reporting metrics.
Permissions-based Dialing Options
Through the use of group permissions, Fonality trixbox Pro can restrict the calling capabilities of various employees (staff vs. executives) in order to safeguard from erroneous monthly billing, including international dialing and even directory assistance restrictions.
Selling trixbox Pro
Fonality trixbox Pro 5.2 is sold through approved resellers.
Fonality trixbox Pro Standard Edition
Fonality trixbox Pro Standard Edition (SE) is the base hybrid-hosted communication solution for small businesses that need enterprise-grade features, including:
· Auto-attendant
· Voicemail to email
· Music on hold
· Company directory
· Phone scheduler
· Call parking and more
The solution also includes the award-winning Unified Communications desktop client Fonality HUD Personal.
Fonality trixbox Pro Enterprise Edition
Building up from the SE edition, trixbox Pro Enterprise Edition (EE) offers additional features including:
· Conference bridges
· Multiple auto-attendants
· Paging and intercom (1 to 1 or group)
· Group permissions and more
The solution also includes the award-winning Unified Communications desktop client Fonality HUD Team that adds:
· Rich presence
· Drag and drop call management
· Private enterprise chat
· Interactive desktop alerts and more
Fonality trixbox Pro Call Center Edition
Fonality trixbox Pro Call Center Edition (CCE) builds on the powerful features of both SE and EE by adding advanced call center capabilities. Designed specifically for SMB call center needs, CCE adds:
· Robust ACD>
· Additional IVR capabilities
· Unlimited call queues
· Skills-based routing
· Real-time queue statistics (with HUD Queues)
· Graphical call statistic reports
· Web-based recording access and more
This version of trixbox Pro is accompanied by Fonality HUD Agent and adds:
· Advanced call center agent capabilities
· On-the-fly recording
· Call barge, monitor, and whisper
· CRM integration
· One-touch agent login and more
Fonality trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition
Purpose-built for those customers leveraging Salesforce CRM licenses, trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition (UAE) is a fully integrated communication solution. UAE Edition automates communication between your communication system and CRM system with advanced features such as:
· Deal-size alerts
· Integrated screen pops
· Click-to-call within SFDC
Managers are given full visibility into their sales representatives’ activities with:
· Automated call history
· Lead management reporting
· Outbound call reports and more
Upgrading customers to Fonality trixbox Pro 5.2
Starting April 1, 2011, customers can begin requesting an upgrade to 5.2 by contacting their reseller or calling Fonality Support direct. The upgrade process has been automated and will enable customers to upgrade on their own through step-by-step instructions.
Partners should direct customers to www.trixbox.com for information regarding the release, key new features, important FAQ, and a step by step checklist to complete prior to requesting a scheduled upgrade.
Scheduling an Upgrade
· Partners and customers can contact 866-366-2548 and request an upgrade using the new “Request an Upgrade” prompt in the IVR.
· Customers will be required to enter their server ID to schedule their upgrade.
· The system will check that this is a new request, place their request into a queue, and provide an expected timeframe (24 – 48 hours) to enable the upgrade link.
· Once support enables the upgrade link in the admin panel of the server ID requested, the partner/customer will be notified that their upgrade can be initiated.
Active Support Agreement
If a customer is not on an active support agreement, the customer upgrade request will be sent to the reseller and Fonality channel sales for follow up to ensure the customer is on an active agreement for additional support. To proceed with the upgrade without a support agreement, must send approval to the support team. Otherwise, support must wait until there is an active agreement prior to completing the upgrade process.
LightBound is your Fonality Authorized Reseller for trixBox Pro Editions for VoIP PBXsolutions both hosted and premise based IP Based Telephony.
LightBound offers VoIP across America with SIP, PRI or Analog. LightBound can provide service to over 98% of the populated country. This is a great option for companies wanting to have virtual numbers in other cities. Connecting multiple offices with a centralized IP PBX phone system.
Let us take care of technology, so you can take care of business.
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 migration-less 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 under-utilization 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-mid-size 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.
www.lightbound.net
One of the unique abilities of LightBound is to be able to provide and support many different services. Many clients have multiple locations and are looking for WAN area networks to connect their data and voice. Some look at MPLS, which can be very cost effective for larger companies, however small and medium size customers often feel they are little fish in a very big pond. LightBound provides a MPLS type managed network that allows us to deliver data, internet and voice to a customer bringing all the circuits back to our LightBound Data Center in Indianapolis. Many customers will get collocation space from us and put their PBX's or LightBounds Hosted PBX service, servers and firewall in rack or take advantage of LightBounds Managed Virtual Services,managed storage or replication. This lets LightBound with our redundant internet, voice and power to be the host site and have the customers sites be the remotes. This allows LightBound to provide a one stop shop for all of the customers needs and usually for less expense.
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
One of the unique abilities of LightBound is to be able to provide and support many different services. Many clients have multiple locations and are looking for WAN area networks to connect their data and voice. Some look at MPLS, which can be very cost effective for larger companies, however small and medium size customers often feel they are little fish in a very big pond. LightBound provides a MPLS type managed network that allows us to deliver data, internet and voice to a customer bringing all the circuits back to our LightBound Data Center in Indianapolis. Many customers will get collocation space from us and put their PBX's or LightBounds Hosted PBX service, servers and firewall in rack or take advantage of LightBounds Managed Virtual Services,managed storage or replication. This lets LightBound with our redundant internet, voice and power to be the host site and have the customers sites be the remotes. This allows LightBound to provide a one stop shop for all of the customers needs and usually for less expense.
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
LightBound, an Indiana based manged server host,offers solutions for the small to medium sized business. For those businesses without a full time IT staff or those looking to eliminate the hardware costs and maintenance of their servers, the LightBound virtual server platform is ideal. LightBound uses a robust network of both hardware and software to configure the best solution for each customer's needs.
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
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.
Go Cloud!
LightBound offers small business server hosting at their state of the art data center. LightBound also offers manged server hosting to allow customers to lease the hardware and have a specialist monitor and update each server accordingly.
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.
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.
If you are ever looking for an Indiana VoIP provider that provides a hosted VoIP PBX Solutions make sure that they address the issue of QOS (Quality of Service) over the WAN circuit that delivers Internet Service. The Internet WAN circuit needs to be a dedicated circuit to the location of the VoIP switch so QOS can be set up point to point. Many VoIP Service Providers will position that their hosted managed solution can work over any broadband Internet connection. The hosted voice solution will work most of the time, but there will also be some troublesome times when it flat out does not work at all. This has to do with QOS. The voice call is very delay sensitive and when there is too much delay voice quality suffers with dropped packets and garbled messages. The voice call is contending with downloads (ftp sessions, streaming videos). if there is no priority given of voice over other applications there is no way that voice packets are delivered on time. This is especially troublesome for customers who are looking for small business Server hosting or managed servers hosting because in most cases they don't have IT & telecom staff with the expertise to know how to set up QOS or why QOS matters. The small business customers are many times subject to a bait and switch tactic to get the deal for voice with a long term goal of getting the broadband circuit business. The VoIP service provider will set the hosted voice solution at a low cost per seat versus current service which will attract the customer to sign a contract usually for several years at what appears to be a lower cost of service. But usually after a few months of being frustrated with the occasional voice problems the customer will switch from their broadband Internet provider to a dedicated circuit to the VoIP Service Provider they contracted service with. This will usually be at a premium. It's best work work with VoIP service providers who address the QOS issue up front and are honest with the customers.
How many businesses in Central Indiana can afford to maintain a staff 24x7x365 to support their IT systems? How many businesses need 24x7x365 to remain competitive in today's always business environment? All of them! In order to do so many businesses are migrating to an environment that provides business continuity 24 x 7 in order to accomplish this. Moving critical applications to managed servers hosting environment or server collocation in an Indiana Server Hosting Data Center can accomplish this. A data center that has 24x7 network operations center staff can provide data disaster recover in the event an issue happens with one of the servers. In additional moving to a VoIP PBX and locating in the data center using voice services from a VoIP service provide can bring an extra level of business continuity. This type of service is not only for large Enterprise customers. Small Business server hosting can also be done quite cost effectively. WAN consolidation can also provide enhanced business continuity by centralizing in a data center where business applications reside. WAN consolidation also provides considerable cost savings in many cases. The only way this will work for companies is by using high speed Internet in Indiana. Providers of Indiana DSL Internet, Ethernet or T1 Internet can provide this high speed Internet Connectivity. The data center and managed services can provide round the clock support in a highly available and reliable facility at a fraction of the cost of employee staff to perform the IT support functions. To keep businesses running 24x7 this should be a key part of a successful business strategy.
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