Infrastructure-as-a-Service: IaaS, PaaS VM's
BlueCentral host and manage infrastructure-as-a-service from within our Tier 1 data centres (where all key elements are duplicated as per the Uptime Institute measurements for Tier 3) and deliver connectivity via high performance, carrier grade infrastructure. These are our main data centre services. This ensures continuity and availability of service across all levels of our managed hosting service offerings, to support hosted e-commerce. It also enables us to deliver a complete Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for those clients who need the complete arrangement.
Our world class data centers include the latest in technology and security systems, ranging from our Diesel Power Generation Plants that provide our customers with un-interruptible power supplies (UPS) right through to our security and technology experts that provide our customers with on-going support and upgrades.
Some of the features of our infrastructure are:
- 24x7 on-site physical security
- Hosted Network security
- Data protection
- 24x7 video surveillance
- Other various hosted intrusion protection systems (both IPS and IDS)
- Tier 3 Data Centers
- On-site diesel generation plant for back-up power(to support hosted DR)
- Un-interruptible power supplies
- Multiple air handling and cooling units
- Hosted EMC SAN Storage infrastructure
- VESDA Fire Suppression systems
- Carrier grade routing, load balancing and switching infrastructure
Managed Tier 3 Dell Server Infrastructure for IaaS and PaaS Hosting
BlueCentral uses the latest in Dell server technology including Intel® and Xeon® processors, EMC SAN and local hard drive storage including SCSI and SATA drives configured for RAID1, RAID5 or RAID10 as needed. BlueCentral consistently upgrade and updates our hosted dedicated server platform to provide optimum performance for their clients for both dedicated server functions and hosted virtualization platforms. Our server technologies are always the latest in the range and therefore ensure our customers have access to the latest and most up to date processing and memory sets.
Foundry Load Balancing - LB Hosting, GLB Service with F5
With support for custom health checks and efficient Server Load Balancing technologies, BlueCentral can balance traffic amongst several servers whilst simultaneously monitoring server, application and content health. Our secure Internet gateway has enterprise grade load balancing devices in place to ensure your traffic and end-user response is always optimised. This is true dual-site hosting, the pre-cursor to flexible cloud services
More importantly, we now offer direct private high speed links, installed and managed by BlueCentral between Sydney and Melbourne enabling true disaster recovery hosting and also data replication.
Juniper Firewalls Provide Secure Hosting, Managed Internet Data Connectivity
Juniper firewalls provide our customers with an unprecedented level of security for small and medium business hosting.
BlueCentral’s High Performance Infrastructure creates high availability and performance through the use of redundant components throughout our infrastructure and systems. The BlueCentral Internet Gateway’s in Melbourne and Sydney are designed to support high throughput and guarantee that our client infrastructure is secure and able to send and receive every data packet expected.
Redundant switches and automatic fail-over combined with our high performance, server independent, centralised storage subsystems utilising SAN storage facilities results in a service that is always available and highly flexible, true managed internet connectivity.
On-Demand Storage, Cloud Storage
BlueCentral provide ‘On-Demand’ storage services via use of Enterprise Class EMC storage devices. These devices are connected via high speed fibre-channel connectivity and switching interfaces offering both high and low speed storage options.
Our facilities, storage infrastructure and Internet Gateway’s are all tier 3 and give our customers strong and reliable business class connectivity. This combined with our binding SLA's, carrier neutral, multi-homed bandwidth and load balanced servers brings you a premium Australian service that is backed by our Priority One Support.
Hosting Performance Metrics - 99.95% Up-time to 99.999 "Five-Nines" or Zero Downtime?
In reality, our two main data centres that provide hosting in Melbourne and Sydney, achieved a "five nines" (99.999%) uptime for environmental hosting services during 2009-2010. Environmentals include CRAC airconditioning, UPS, hosted SAN, Shared hosted VMs and electricity. This is achieved via redundancy built into all the systems supporting our hosting floor and a durable and predictable hosting service.
Fault tolerant hosting designs with manual or automatic fail-over services can be provided for a slightly higher cost, where mission critical application hosting support is required.
We guarantee at least 99.99% uptime for all our environmental services and greater than 99.95% availability for core BlueCentral enterprise data centre services. We confirm this contractually to our BlueCentral customers via contracted SLG's with rebates.
100% Hosting Up-time, Error Free Hosting, Auto Fail-Over for Critical Hosting
A few of our competitors offer 100% uptime, (or zero downtime!) but without a guarantee. It not worth the paper its not written on! (compared with 99.999% uptime which is no more than 4 minutes per month outage). In reality, this is regularly achieved for our data center environmentals, but is unlikely to be achieved year after year for hosted infrastructure, without a deliberate fault tolerant design, usually with active-active hosting across multiple data-centres. This design is in place in test for two of our key customers in 2010, and will be viable and tested in the near future.
Co-Location or Colocation, with Hybrid Hosting Options
At a time when many hosters are moving away from co-location of customer equipment, BlueCentral is pleased to provide Sydney and Melbourne co-location hosting options in Tier 3 or Tier 2 datacentres. For a hoster, the key costs are rent, people and more importantly electricity costs, so our contracts reflect the potential variances in these areas, particularly the latter.
Data Centre or US Data Center?
When should you use data centre services overseas?
The primary reason you would look for USA based hosting or hosted services in Europe, would be to take advantage of a close-ness to the international market you wish to serve. There are some cases where internet performance in the USA in particular, is superior in terms of reduced latency and in some cases price. However, many of our customers use both our Australian Hosting service and others, and the price difference is trivial, or in fact favours Australian hosting where a true apples-to-apples comparison of hosted services is done, particularly for HA or HAaaS services for critical application hosting.
BlueCentral provides Data Center IaaS services such as Sydney & Melbourne co-locations in Tier 3 or Tier 2 datacentres.
Green Data Centre Hosting
Green IT Data Centres are becoming the norm, with ever reducing PUE measurements confirming that we all save electricity and reduce our carbon footprint. Both the BlueCentral data centres are built to provide a PUE ratio less than 1.7 when full.
And yes, we still supply specialist co-location services in Sydney and Melbourne!
For more information about BlueCentral's Data Centre and Infrastructure Solutions contact us on 1300 258 323 or complete the enquiry form to your right and one of our service consultants will contact you shortly.