SPECIAL OFFERS - SERVIA VIRTUAL HOSTING

Save money and improve business agility with a virtual hosting solution based on the Nviron Servia cloud services platform.

The current economic outlook is forcing every business to reduce costs, batten down the hatches and plan for a future recovery. Those of us who work in IT have seen it before and know that it means we will be given less money but still expected to deliver the same level of service and functionality. Squaring this circle can seem an impossible task, but there ways of improving cash flow and reducing costs that you may not yet have considered.

Hardware and software costs may have fallen as a percentage of the total IT spend over the last few years. Despite this, they still account for a significant proportion of the IT budget and are an obvious place to look for savings. Not replacing ageing systems over the usual 3/5 year lifecycle will save money, but can lead to reduced productivity and increased support costs.

Rather than not replacing ageing servers, PCs and software why not look at a different way of getting the functionality you need. There is no value in owning hardware and software. It does not appreciate in value and needs regular maintenance, yet many organisations still insist in buying it outright.

While leasing can help cash flow, it can also be inflexible and unable to respond to changing organisational requirements for IT, but there is another alternative.

Flexible enough to cope with changing circumstances

Hosting, whereby you pay a monthly or annual fee to a third party to provide and manage your hardware and software at their site, has proved to be a viable business model. Traditional hosting solutions can be inflexible leading to long-term over capacity and a marked lack of flexibility. But virtual hosting can overcome these problems as well as offering increased flexibility and scalability to cope with changing business and market requirements. This can cover greater or even reduced demand for IT resources from your organisation.

Servia virtual hosting service provides a cost-effective annuity model alternative to purchasing hardware and software outright. It is based on our hosted servers at our state-of-the-art Manchester data centre that utilises market-leading VMware and Hyper-V virtualisation software to deliver a flexible and scalable solution to your computing needs.

Software can be provided via the Microsoft Service Provider Licence Agreement (SPLA). This covers everything from server and desktop operating systems, through Web site and database provision and even office productivity tools like Microsoft Office.

Benefits

By getting your hardware and software hosted externally, you will enjoy the following benefits:

• Cost effective - provides enterprise computing power at SME pricing

• High availability - ensures minimal downtime and offers the capability to build to disaster recovery into your IT infrastructure

• Scalability - enables new capacity to be easily added and removed within hours, so that you only ever pay for what you need

• Serviceability - enables non-disruptive migrations of virtual machines from one physical server to another

The nTrust virtual hosting service ensures you only pay for what you use. It delivers a cost-effective and scalable method of providing IT infrastructure to any size of organisation.

Secure and always available

We have made a significant investment in our data centre facilities in Manchester. To ensure continuous access to hosted services, Nviron offers a multilink VPN facility which allows client premises to be connected via multiple paths over low cost xDSL connections. Multiple feeds coupled with clustered firewalls ensure that the data centre is always visible via the Internet. Mobile users can be serviced by dedicated client VPN software or SSL protected terminal services.

A daily back up service ensures that valuable business data is maintained off-site in two alternate locations allowing full system and individual file restores to be made.

In the event of a physical data centre disaster Nviron’s standard contract provides for the rebuild of its services and replacement of the equipment via its insurance policies. The recovery time is limited by equipment availability and delivery lead times.

To find out more about how our virtual hosting solutions can help your business reduce costs, contact us now on 01928 809000.