Please register if you havent already done so. Feel free to invite friends, co-workers, clients, etc. The agenda and registration link can be found here: http://demodays.info
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.
NOT OUT YET, but here are some things to look forward to. 1. Voicemail-only and Virtual Extensions The new Virtual extension is primarily for call forwarding when you have am extension number used for little or nothing else. The Voicemail-only extension on the other hand, is used when you need to have an alternate mailbox or special box to collect VM that is not specific to an individual user on your system (e.g. maybe at the end of a call menu that rings a queue, unanswered calls all go to a single mailbox that represents missed calls for that queue). The new Virtual extension is different from a virtual extension in previous releases. The difference here is that now there is no unique user assigned to the virtual extension it is considered a Non-User extension type. This means it will not have a username or login available and cannot, for example, be an agent in a queue. Because it is not a user, it has no voicemail and no first/last name (not a person so why have a name right?). The voicemail only extensions do no call routing at all and simply have a VM box. Both VM Only and Virtual extensions can be in the Company Directory, In HUD. Only VMO extensions can be in the Name Directory though (the one over the phone) and only Virtual extensions can be either public or private extensions. Of course standard users with extensions have all these features and more, so these are just each a scaled down version of a user and extension tooled for a specific purpose. 2. Users with Extensions Each user can now have multiple extensions. For example, an existing employee, Mike, needs a second phone for his home office. This option creates a new extension and associates it with Mike's user account.
3.Directed Call Pickup *88+Ext will allow you to pick up a call from a specific extension with a ringing call.
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.
It's not out yet, but here ar some things to look forward to.
1. Linked Servers, Users now have many functions across linked servers, including: see call status of linked extensions, barge across linked server, see & join conference rooms on a on linked server, retrieve calls parked by linked extension, add linked extensions to your queue, and so much more! 2. Support for Windows 7 3. HUDdy List, This HUDdy list shows the people you contact the most. This list is stored on the server side so restarting or reinstalling the HUD client will not reset your HUDdy List. The HUDdy list score is determined by the sum of chat sessions + outgoing calls to a person. 4. Support for MAC OS10.6 5. Whisper, When whispering a person that is on a call, you can hear the entire call, but only the person you 'whispered' can hear you. 6. whispered by that person. 7. New Queue Stats The queue detail window now includes additional statistics: - Time to Answer Service Level Agreement (TTA SLA). The TTA SLA can be set in the Web Admin Panel on a per queue basis - Duration (the duration of an active call) - Idle (the time elapsed since the agent last took a call from any queue) - Calls (the total number of calls the agent has taken since the stats were last reset) - Avg. (the average talk time per completed call for that agent).
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.
Endless Possibilities for NSOEM and Fonality IP PBX Solutions
Installing drilling and power solutions is hard enough; the staff at NSOEM didn’t want to put in hours installing and maintaining the company’s phone system. So when NSOEM decided to replace its AT&T key system with Fonality’s PBXtra with HUD Agent, it was a match made in Houston. PBXtra’s flexible feature set, simple installation and administration, and ability to create a single phone network among a distributed workforce with multiple office locations are a hit at NSOEM. And HUD’s ability to track staff locations and quickly transfer calls meant that the company had finally found a phone system that it could hang its hat on.
NSOEM is a Houston-based manufacturer’s representative that focuses on engineering sales for electrical products related to drilling and custom power solutions. As the company expanded, its existing AT&T key phone system didn’t offer the flexibility it needed and often suffered from bad call quality. NSOEM needed a new phone system that was reliable and flexible, and that could easily connect its headquarters with its new warehouse facility, as well as with reps in the field. PBXtra Works for NSOEM
On the hunt for its new system, NSOEM narrowed the search to Fonality’s PBXtra with HUD Agent and a system from a local phone installer. “I was impressed because, when I was evaluating PBXtra, I was working directly with Fonality,” said Keith Howard, operations manager at NSOEM. “The other vendor didn’t even distinguish who the phone system manufacturer was, and that didn’t sit well with me.”
Howard found that PBXtra’s technology fit his organization perfectly, too. “PBXtra is a phone system that works for us, rather than having us work for it. It’s incredibly easy to install, and the possibilities of what you can do with the system are endless.” PBXtra has allowed NSOEM to easily create a single phone network; now employees, regardless of whether they are working from the main office, its new warehouse or a remote location, are able to present a united, professional image to customers. And, the system will also be used to connect a new Louisiana office when it goes online later this year.
PBXtra’s flexibility was another key reason NSOEM chose to work with Fonality. “PBXtra allows me to tailor the system exactly how I want to. It saves me time and gets the job done right,” said Howard. Being able to route calls to the main office, to a different first point of contact, or directly to field reps’ cell phones has been a real time and customer service improvement for NSOEM. Efficiency Is Up With HUD
PBXtra’s HUD has proven to be a favorite with Howard because his field sales team often travels to customer locations to evaluate and install products. “HUD is absolutely great,” he said. “It allows me to see whether my field reps are available no matter where they are, and it makes transferring calls to them a breeze. I simply drag and drop the call to wherever they are.”
Howard is also extremely pleased with HUD’s Outlook integration. “With HUD, I barely touch the buttons on my phone anymore! I just click on a number from my Outlook contacts list and the call is placed for me,” said Howard. “HUD is especially useful for international calls because I can program the country codes once and then forget about them.” The Future and VoIP
NSOEM is currently operating a mixed VoIP and analog environment, but Howard is eager to test the possibilities of VoIP further. He anticipates that “PBXtra will help us save a bundle when working internationally. With PBXtra, soft phones and an internet connection, we can work around the world without huge telephone fees. It’s just one more way that PBXtra will work for us.”
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.
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.
What do you do... If you are a technology minded real estate management firm with over $1 billion in real estate assets and you're planning for a call center? If you are Oregon-based PREM Group, you choose Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Pro, of course. Beating out ShoreTel on both price and standards-based technology, PBXtra provided a powerful call center solution that integrates with CRM software, helps build customer retention and improves employee efficiency. Prepping for a Call Center — PBXtra and PREM Group Set the Stage What do you do if you are a technology minded real estate management firm with over $1 billion in real estate assets and you're planning for a call center? If you are Oregon-based PREM Group, you choose Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Pro, of course. Beating out ShoreTel on both price and standards-based technology, PBXtra provided a powerful call center solution that integrates with CRM software, helps build customer retention and improves employee efficiency. PREM Group is a Portland, Oregon-based real estate management company with approximately 2.5 million square feet of real estate assets valued at $1 billion. The company's vision is to be the most progressive and innovative real estate service company, and it views technology as a strategic asset for reaching this goal. Given its top-down approach to technology and future plans for a call center, it's no wonder that when PREM Group decided to purchase a new phone system, it selected Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Pro, which supports the latest and greatest in convergent technologies. Standards-Based Wins the Race "We looked at several vendors, namely Fonality and ShoreTel," said Brian Thompson, chief information officer at PREM Group. "We were attracted to Fonality for several reasons. In addition to cost, the fact that the technology is standards-based and SIP [session initiation protocol]-supported architecture was also instrumental in our decision. The PBXtra system was extremely well priced; it cost us roughly half of what a ShoreTel system would have cost." Being a technology-minded company, PREM Group has its eye on the future and is interested in adopting new, convergent technologies that integrate well with other systems. According to Thompson, "it was important that our new phone system support open standards, especially SIP. SIP support is one of the reasons we chose Fonality over ShoreTel: PBXtra supports SIP and ShoreTel does not. Fonality allows us to integrate PBXtra with SugarCRM, our customer relationship software. This enables us to build customer retention by delivering highly personalized services according to individual customer attributes and history. It goes beyond conventional "help desk" solutions by automating not only the agent-customer interaction, but by creating an enterprise workflow focused on serving customers through fulfillment of their requests." Sophisticated Options with PBXtra and HUD Although PREM Group does not have a true call center in place today, it selected Fonality's most powerful phone system -- PBXtra Call Center Edition. The choice of PBXtra Call Center Edition allows PREM Group to link transactions in the call center with back office fulfillment operations, and leverage some powerful call center features, such as load balancing and call queues. This ensures that the company has the appropriate system in place to create a complete, in-house call center within the next year. Of particular interest to PREM Group was Fonality's HUD Pro product, which gives operators a sophisticated way to handle incoming calls. "With HUD Pro, our operators can park a call and check a property manager's availability before transferring the call or putting it through to voicemail," Thompson continued. "HUD Pro is an efficiency tool that fits well with our corporate mission, and helps us serve our customers better." All PREM Group employees also use HUD from their desktops for interoffice dialing and to determine who is in the office or on the phone at any given time. "The ability with HUD to just click and automatically call an employee's cell phone is a very popular feature with our employees." LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound 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.
How many times have you taken a call on your cell phone and the person asked a question that needs to be answered by someone at the office. What do you do? You say, "Please hangup and call Bob at this phone number.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to transfer the call back to some in the office using just an extension or to another cell phone? Calls can be done with a consultive transfer or blind transfer.
Now you can with LightBound's Fonality Phone System feature Mobile Boomerang. This service is available as a CPE based IP Telephone System or hosted in our secure Data Center. We also offer a pure Hosted IP Telephone system that will make your cell phone or home phone part of your Telephone System running over LightBound's Data Network. Never running over the raw Internet like other VOIP providers. Increasing productivity and the abililty to provide better customer service. Now you can never miss a phone call.
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound offers virtual storage and hosted virtual servers. LightBound can combine managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require, regardless of their technical expertise.
We are working with a large Professional sports team that is looking to replace their current 12 year Nortel phone system. Prospect has unique setup with several hundred employees all needing DID (Direct Inward Dial) numbers and Call Center features for sales and customer service group including call monitoring. In addition, they have almost 700 analog phones around their facility. LightBound was able to propose a solution that would allow them to keep their legacy analog phones and give them IP PBX solution for their office with all the bells and whistles that Fonality provides.
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.
Have you been curious about the Fonality trixbox PBX but haven't been able to get away from the office to come to a Lunch and Learn? Fonality trixbox is a full featured, cost effective VoIP PBX that brings enterprise level phone system functionality like presence management, call queues, and CRM integration to the small to mid-sized businesses. Let us come to you with our monthly webinars. Webinars will last about an hour, starting at 11:30.
Location: LightBound Data Center 731 W. Henry St, 2nd Floor Indianapolis, 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.
So what if you aren't the biggest operation out there?
You should still be able to present a professional image at an affordable cost. That's what Orion Logistics, a third party logistics service provider, believed. After a quick Google search uncovered Fonality, Orion was en route to replacing its failing phone system with PBXtra. Low cost and feature rich, PBXtra has improved customer service and employee efficiency all while making the company look great to the outside world. Making a Move; Orion Logistics Takes PBXtra Along with Great Results
Orion Logistics, Inc. is a third party logistics service provider offering services to companies that want to outsource the physical distribution of manufactured products. When the company began planning to move its operation to a new 100,000 square foot warehouse, management was debating whether to invest in moving and reprogramming their existing phone system, which didn't provide the advanced features they needed, or go shopping for a new phone system. Moving on Up for Less than $10K?
At the time, Orion, which has 15 employees, had regular phone lines and an AT&T Partner phone system that was purchased in the late 1990s. After looking at the cost of moving its existing system and what features they would ideally like to have in a phone system, Orion decided to look for a new system. "We wanted our phones to be automatically answered, have good voicemail, transfer calls to employees in the warehouse and conference calls together," said Jim White, IT manager at Orion. "We also wanted to purchase and install our new phone system, without hiring a phone guy or relying on other expensive outside consultants."
"I found out about Fonality through searching on Google," said White. "The PBXtra system was very attractively priced and had all the features we wanted and more. We did not want to make a five figure investment in our new phone system. For not much more than moving our broken phone system, we could implement our new advanced PBXtra system. Plus, we didn't want to have to dedicate staff to the ongoing function of our phone system and with PBXtra we wouldn't have to." Orion liked the fact that Fonality provides automatic software updates and can administer its server remotely. The one time, in 14 months, that Orion needed help, Fonality support was able to look at its server remotely, see immediately what was going on and fix the problem. Improving Employee Productivity and Customer Service
Since Orion is a warehouse operation, employees are often out in the warehouse rather than at their desks. With Fonality, employees can easily have their cell phones configured as extensions, which makes it possible to transfer calls to them while out on the warehouse floor. This feature has made a huge difference for Orion. Employees now answer calls that they weren't able to before, which saves time, increases productivity and allows Orion to provide better service.
"When I went through the steps to start configuring people's cell phones as PBXtra extensions, we all thought it was incredible," said White. "With this feature, we don't have to keep customers waiting, there is no need to install phones all over the place, and people can keep working while they take calls from customers, dispatchers, suppliers, etc. It is a big time saver!"
White is impressed with Fonality's ability to forward voicemail to email, which allows employees to listen to voicemail from their computer either remotely or at their desks. He also likes the ability to administer the phones from a web browser, which "saves time and give us better control."
"We aren't a huge operation, but we did want our new phone system to give us a really professional presentation to the world. We need to answer phones and be responsive to customers, suppliers and partners. PBXtra allows us to do that and a lot more."
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.
I spoke with a potential customer this week who is interested in hosting SQL, Sharepoint, and smart mail servers at our data center using the LightBound Virtualization services. Initially they were interested in only managed server hosting, but realized the hardware cost and maintenance would be a challenge to maintain. I was able to provide a solution using our virtualization and cloud services that would meet both his performance and budgetary needs.
Dont' forget LightBound Lunch And Learn June 16, 2010 11:30 to 1:00 at our 731 W. Henry location. We will be covering LightBound Hosted IP service with Fonality. Come see hands on our VoIP PBX solution hosted in LightBound state of the art data center. http://www.lightbound.net/company/events.php
LightBound and Fonality are providing the best of both worlds with our VoIP PBX solution that can be either hosted in our Cloud, in the cage in the datacenter or on premise. Services is expandable from 5 to 99 users. Both solutions include Fonality HUD (Heads UP Display) that gives customer full view of everyone who is on the telephone, enterprise level chat and point and click capability.
LightBound is also offering fiber conductivity to many major office buildings in the downtown area. Let us show you how you can combine your PBX solution with voice and data on a high speed fiber network. Backup and virtual services are also available.
We will also be providing tours of the data center. 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.
I know that people think of Asterisk based VoIP PBX solutions like Fonality are for small organization.
Having evaluate Fonality trixbox Pro Unified Agent (UAE) edition and Call Center Editions, I can tell you that they are full featured Call Centers that can expand to over 100 plus Agents. UAE and Call Center Edition include a very full featured supervisor tool as well as very extensive reporting.
UAE integrates with SalesForce.com and SugarCRM with customizations available to integrate with many other packages.
Call Center has high level features like Skills-based Routing
Assign each agent a priority and your queue will distribute calls to them accordingly. This means you can pass more leads to your star-closer, or pass fewer leads to your underperformers. trixbox Pro offers an additional layer of prioritization based on agent order. This means similarly skilled agents can receive calls in an ordered, round-robin fashion.
Graphical Queue Reports
View graphical reports on every detail of your queues such as: abandoned calls, completed calls, hold time, average call length, agent productivity, and much more. Also view graphs of call volume and call completion by day, weekday, or even hourly averages. These averaged reports are great tools that allow you to better predict optimal call center staffing levels!
Barge Report
With the ability to barge calls using HUD Agent, your call center manager can now run reports on these barged calls from the CDR Reports page.
Agent Call Recording
Record your agents' calls -- automatically. Schedule up to 50 calls per agent. Call recordings capture agent name, agent extension, date, time, Caller ID, DNIS and file size. Using the Web-based interface, you can then listen to calls through your computer speakers or download them to your local drive.
Agents on Cell Phones
Remote agents on cell phones or analog home phones can now seamlessly participate in your queues. This means that callers will never know if the answering agent is on an IP phone in your office or on a mobile phone in another part of the world! Agents Shared across Sites
Have a Call Center that spans multiple offices? With trixbox Pro's Linked Server Software and trixbox Pro CCE, you can have agents across several branch offices participate in the same queue. Real-time Queue Stats
Want to know how many callers are in your queues? Need to know which agents are logged in? Need to know which of your agents is already on a call? The trixbox Pro Web-based control panel answers all of these questions, helping you to manage your queues with real time stats.
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.
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.
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.
731 W. Henry St, 2nd Floor
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