Business Critical Hosting

Failure Free - Every Server - Every Day.

Essentially, this means that between procuring Enterprise Level Hardware, and managing it using a Virtualised, fault Tolerant management suite, your Server has a very very low chance of ever going down, or being off-line.

This is what sets us apart! To this end we are committed!

There are three components to providing a Business Critical Hosting service:

• World Class Hosting Environment
• Enterprise Level Servers
• Virtualised Infrastructure

Definition

By Definition “Business critical" is a term that is used to describe situations in which some sort of disruption of activity occurs that has the potential to shut down a business operation.

Essentially, if certain events should take place that involve the failure of software or equipment, or if some sort of natural disaster occurs that renders a business facility unable to function, this could have a crippling effect on the company, making it impossible for the business to pursue its mission.

Much of the activity of crisis management within a company operation is devoted to identifying scenarios that could be mission critical and developing ways to minimize the impact of those events.

World Class Hosting Environment

Features of the APD Partner run Hosting Internet Data Centre

High Speed Network - The IDC Local Area Network (LAN) is based on high-speed switched Gigabit Ethernet technology. The LAN is connected directly to Internet Solution’s high-speed network infrastructure described above.

Fire Protection - The IDC equipment and support rooms are contained in fully fire-rated enclosures. Automatic fire protection conforms to the latest environmental protocols.

Air Conditioning - Appropriately selected "close-control" air conditioning maintains room temperatures at a continuously stable 21°C. This type of control ensures a stable environment, thereby enhancing life and performance of processing and switching equipment.

Physical Security - The IDC is physically secured by means of online access control systems, including double access doors and Biometric identification. Physical access is restricted to registered Technical Contacts only.

Power – The power system delivers Eskom power to the facility via an automatically operated back-up generator, which is situated in a similarly fire-protected, secure environment. Power supplies to the critical load components are fed via parallel redundant UPS systems with both battery arrays for instantaneous power backup and diesel generators for sustained power backup.

Environmental monitoring - This is undertaken by means of water detection facilities, high temperature sensing, and fire and fault conditions with response solutions being implemented automatically.

Advantages of Server Rental

Support and Stock Availability - Customers renting servers from APD benefit from APD’ competence in this arena in terms of the trained hardware support engineers as well as APD on-site stock of server spares for quick resolution of fault situations.

Minimize risk - The server rental option minimizes the customer’s exposure to risk since APD carries all costs and charges associated with the maintenance and support of this hardware.

Reduced Capex - The server rental option eliminates the need for significant, upfront capital expenses incurred if purchasing hardware. Furthermore, this option allows companies to keep this payment "off the balance sheet".

Network Diversity & Performance

Our Datacentre Partners network has been engineered from the ground up to accommodate the high-availability demands of the mission-critical systems we manage. Their Juniper-powered, Dual Routing Engine Equipment has unique self-healing attributes that allows them to deliver a near 100% network infrastructure availability guarantee. The resulting architecture is redundant in every element, from edge routers to core switches.

In the event that one of these components should fail, the redundant network device will pick up the functionality without interruption of service. The convergence time is around 50ms and is practically hitless. Their network architecture is designed with dual physical routes to their providers, as well as the physical hardware itself which is connected to our backbone and peering / transit providers.

The equipment provides high availability features for maximum network uptime by providing carrier class reliability and redundancy. Their network is fully meshed and redundant with multiple backbone providers using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) from multiple diverse routes: Internet Solutions, MTN, Neotel, SAIX, Telia Sonera and Savvis to mention a few.

Enterprise Level Servers

Firstly, it's important to know that we own our servers outright!

We do not rent or lease servers from a 3rd party. They are ours. Managed and Serviced by our Technicians.

Business Critical Servers are a special breed of servers. They are not your standard tower or rack server. They comprise of no single point of failure. In other words, there is no single piece of equipment failure that will result in the Server being rendered unusable.

We spec'd and bought our Servers with Enterprise Redundancy in mind. These Servers were designed to meet the needs of nearly any IT environment. Built with powerful Intel Xeon processors and advanced systems management capabilities, they are ideal for the demanding applications at the core of most datacentres.

We can seamlessly scale from 4GB to 256GB of DDR3 RAM per Physical Server. By using servers design with these capabilities, it allows your organisation to add significant performance in an exceptionally energy efficient and easily managed form factor.

Using Redundant Power supplies, dozens of Network Interface Cards, RAID 50 Configurations on ALL our Storage Devices, combined with Remote Hardware Management and Monitoring capabilities, we can deliver a Server backbone that is deserving of your Business.

Virtualised Infrastructure

To support a truly complete fault tolerant system, one needs the combination of both Enterprise level hardware, and Fault tolerant Virtualisation Technology. This pools hardware resources into a pool of resources that can be leveraged to form a fluid, fault tolerant pool that is able to move workloads between physical Servers instantly in the rare event of some component failure.

Using VMware Technology, we turn our Enterprise Level Servers into a flexible cloud infrastructure with the performance and reliability needed to run enterprise applications on the platform trusted by the most demanding datacentres around the world. Leverage existing assets and applications while offering self-service deployment and provisioning through virtualization. Create a private cloud and deliver IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service.

Deliver IT as a service, when and where needed, while reducing capital and operating costs. Reduce power needs while freeing your IT staff from mundane administrative tasks so they can focus on innovative solutions to your changing business needs.

Depending on your service and options, you may or may not use these VMware features in the service provided to you.