Storage as a Service

Is your direct attached storage at capacity for your servers and your are thinking about adding more storage or a NAS?  Is the maintenance for your current SAN up for renewal but budget is limited?   Are you at capacity for your current SAN but don't have capital to acquire another SAN chassis?  If you answer yes to any of these question Scale Computing SAN is something you need to look at.  Scale Computing SAN is about 1/2 to 1/3 the price of competing SAN solution, is less complex to operation, and expands when you need to in 1,2, and 4 TB increments with a scalable predictable cost.  Scale Computing also includes replication so if you have DR requirements you can locate another Scale SAN in an off site location and replicate.  To save on capital costs LightBound uses Scale Computing SAN as part of the off-site data backup service for a monthly recurring cost.  LightBound also sells Scale Computing Storage Area Network Solutions and can fully implement the SAN on your site and also set up the replication to our shared storage server.   LightBound is an Indiana High Speed Internet provider and offers circuits starting at a T1 to a direct fiber connection that can provide the bandwidth needed for the replication server.  If you want to take 10 minutes to see what Scale is all about lick on webinar to watch a short video. If you need more information on Scale's SAN & NAS please send an email to sales@lightbound.net or contact your LightBound account manager.

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.

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Robust feature set. Check. Pure VoIP capabilities. Check. Simple Scalability. Check. myShape was bursting at the seams and in desperate need of a new phone system. This online women’s clothing retailer already had its phone system requirements down pat. With PBXtra Call Center Edition, myShape found a solution that fits like a glove, right down to the easy deployment and quick addition of more handsets.
With PBXtra Call Center Edition, myShape found a solution that fits like a glove, right down to the easy deployment and quick addition of more handsets.

myShape is an online women’s clothing retailer that is committed to helping customers find sophisticated clothing to fit and flatter their individual body shapes. As a rapidly growing ecommerce organization, the myShape management team firmly believes in using technology to advance its business objectives. When the company relocated from a business technology incubator facility to its own office space, technology drove its decision to deploy Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center phone system.
Shopping for a System

With a growing staff overcrowding its current location, myShape needed to move. One of the questions it had to answer beforehand was which phone system to select for its new location. The business technology center, where myShape started its operations, had provided the company with a phone system, so there was no legacy system to take with them when they moved.

With 60 employees and an aggressive growth strategy, myShape co-founder, John Dmohowski, and the IT staff began searching for and evaluating phone system options that would meet the company’s needs. “Cost was not a primary driver for us,” Dmohowski said. “It was more important to find a solution that could scale and deploy easily, and provided a robust feature set.”

The team decided that PBXtra Call Center was the best system for myShape. “We could run PBXtra Call Center as a pure VoIP system, which, as a technology company, was important to us,” Dmohowski continued. “I knew VoIP could provide the capabilities we needed when combined with sufficient bandwidth and would be less painful than working with traditional carriers that couldn’t move fast enough for us. We didn’t have the time to set up an appointment with the carrier every time we needed to add a phone!”

Before selecting PBXtra Call Center, myShape evaluated 10 different solutions and met with four vendors, including Fonality. myShape even considered a hosted VoIP offering from Vocalocity, but decided against it because they wanted to have more control over their phone system than a hosted solution could offer. Besides, Dmohowski had faith in Fonality’s ability to produce upgrades and product extensions.
Trying Fonality on for Size

In the end, Dmohowski determined that Fonality was the right fit for myShape for many reasons: “our Fonality sales rep was terrific, the company’s recommendations for how to integrate technologies were very solid and PBXtra Call Center was clearly the superior technology. With Fonality, we don’t need to rely on the phone company — we are in charge of our own communications. Our IT staff can add a phone in two minutes and have a staff member up and ready to go. I can’t express how important that is to a growing business.”

Adding and moving handsets quickly were of particular importance to myShape since this was the first time the company actually was able to deploy phones to all of its employees. In its previous location, myShape didn’t have enough handsets for every employee, which impacted efficiency. Staff members had to send email messages rather than place phone calls, or use their personal cell phones for business calls.

“The move provided office space for all of our employees, and PBXtra Call Center made deploying phones fast and simple,” Dmohowski added. “Fonality makes it extremely easy to order and install new phones. I just call them and two days later the new phones show up, already configured. All we do is plug them in and we get an instant dial tone. I can’t place a value on that.”

Dmohowski has also found that PBXtra Call Center’s feature set does not require endless training for his staff. “We move too quickly to spend hours on employee training. PBXtra Call Center is nice because it does not get in the way. The phones work like the devices people have been using their whole lives, which is not entirely true of all new products that are supposed to make our lives easier.”
A Well Dressed Solution

In the end, Dmohowski felt his requirements for a VoIP phone system were simple: “it had to work, it had to scale, it had to be easy to deploy and it had to be painless to add and move handsets. PBXtra Call Center met our needs and then some. We’re happy because when we pick up the phone we know we will hear a dial tone. That may sound elementary, but for a young company, it’s extremely important.”

Dmohowski is eager to test PBXtra Call Center to its fullest capabilities. “There is tremendous value in knowing PBXtra Call Center can do more for us. We purchased the system knowing that we wouldn’t use all of the functionality right away, but I’m relieved to know that the system will meet our needs as we grow.”

Now that sounds like a well dressed solution.

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.


Please keep an eye on the new construction of our new state of the art data center providing Indiana with an elite Data Center for all of your Virtual Network Services, Business Continuity, Cloud Services, Storage as a Service, Software as a Solution and VoIP PBX Solutions. 

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

Do you currently have a SAN (Storage Area Network Solutions) from one of the top tier providers? Is you maintenance contract currently up for renewal?   You may want to consider comparing the cost of renewing maintenance on that SAN with purchasing a new SAN from Scale Computing.  A county in Michigan recently went through this scenario when their maintenance came up for renewal and in scrutinizing costs for savings went the route of purchasing a Scale SAN.  They were able to save money and got a brand new SAN on top of it.   LightBound offers Scale Computing SAN for direct customer purchase.  We also offer off site data backup service using Scale's SAN that can provide business continuity at a very effective cost.  If you have a current SAN and need to expand the Scale SAN solution may also make sense.  Most data migrates to a state of being accessed on an infrequent basis, which would be a perfect fit for the Scale Computing SAN.  You can use your current SAN for high performance needs and migrate stale data to the Scale SAN at a much lower operating cost.   See www.scalecomputing.com/ for more information on Scale or to watch a webinar click on Scale Webinar.

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.
 

Learn about the next generation in storage. LightBound has partnered with Scale Computing to offer their complete, end-to-end midmarket storage solution. During this session, you will gain insight into how you can reduce costs while increasing control over your storage systems, as well as making the management of those systems more convenient. Learn more about the Scale 3-C's - COST - CONTROL - CONVENIENCE. Customers are able to build out storage clusters, starting with just 3 useable terabytes up to the multiple petabyte rnage on a single file system using commodity hardware at a shockingly affordable price!

You will also learn about LightBound Storage as a Service and Virtualization Services which are perfect for companies that need highly available and replicated shared storage to remotely backup their on-premise Scale Storage, for servers colocated at LightBound's data center, and for use with LightBound's Managed Server Services.

Go to LightBound's Home page to register for this event.

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!

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

The answer to why we need and want Cloud Services and Storage Area Network Solutions is simple - money.  Ok, there are a few more reasons, but I'll start with cost savings.  Businesses don't generate their own electricity to produce their products and services (except the electric companies). Why? Because due to economies of scale it's much more cost effective to buy the electricity we need from the electric company.  This same economies of scale applies to shared storage and server services. Cloud Services allow businesses of all sizes to buy only the services that they need at that time they need them for a small monthly recurring fee.  No longer do companies have to dole out hundreds of thousands of capital to own and maintain their storage and server hardware.  There are a few more advantages to Cloud Services and Virtualization Services which I will address in my next blog.

Go Cloud!

Sam Newberry

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