- Greg Nares, Director of Sales Engineering
for
FiberMedia Group, LLC, a leading data
center services provider with facilities throughout the New York metropolitan
area and Cleveland, OH, recently sat down for an interview to discuss industry trends
and how their service offerings provide a competitive edge.
Explain
the types of solutions that FiberMedia offers?
FiberMedia
provides Intelligent Data Center
Solutions to enterprise customers. Intelligent
Data Center Solutions seamlessly deliver both the resiliency and security of
physical infrastructure and the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the
Cloud. The company’s data centers are strategically located in six markets
offering both primary and disaster recovery/business continuity services. Locations include Secaucus
NJ, Westchester
NY, Manhattan
NY, Brooklyn NY, Jersey
City NJ, and Cleveland
OH.
FiberMedia’s services
are tailored to our client’s specific needs.
Whether the client is looking to take an existing colocation environment
and wants FiberMedia to take care of physical environment or a client has a Software
as a Service (SaaS) environment and wants FiberMedia to run the OS and database
layer, FiberMedia has a tailored solution to meet those needs. FiberMedia’s offerings can be as simple and
straightforward as colocation with metered power or as comprehensive as a fully
managed offering. This flexibility and focus on client needs is what makes FiberMedia
a partner you can rely upon.
How
are your solutions different from other offerings available in the market?
There are a wide range
of offerings in the market from purely hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
to companies that offer just colocation services. Along this spectrum, FiberMedia is ideally
positioned to be able to offer the types of services and capabilities that
allow our clients to maintain control of the applications and functions they
deem necessary and offload those functions that aren’t a core competency.
Our hybrid solutions
have the ability to provide a current colocation customer, whose equipment may
be End Of Life (EoL), a migration path to the Cloud by providing an on ramp
from our SSAE 16 certified data centers.
At the hardware’s EoL, the client can create a virtual machine in the Cloud
and seamlessly continue to have compute power.
This can be done through a single contract and single bill and the
services are tailored to our customer’s exacting requirements.
What
enhancements, if any, will be made to FiberMedia’s offerings?
We continually seek
ways to enhance and upgrade our existing platform, and it will remain at core
of our offerings. FiberMedia will
continue to add the data center facilities and capabilities that its clients
need to succeed.
Portal
Enhancements
Self-Management
- We currently offer support and management from our existing customer portal and
are looking to introduce self-management capabilities such as the ability to increase or decrease committed bandwidth, vCPU, vRAM,
and increase storage. Subscribers will
also be able to add/remove additional VM's for bursting. We also plan to provide
a catalog of standard VM images that clients will be able to access through the
portal to implement for specific deployment needs. Finally, we plan to allow clients to create
their own VM images, based on their specific requirements.
Enhanced Visibility
- We are looking to provide clients with enhanced visibility into their
environment via a “single pane of glass” viewing capability. This is a capability that many business
customers are looking for and a capability we believe will benefit our clients. It will provide a bird’s eye view into both the
client’s internal and external platforms - all done through a single tool.
In January of this
year, we launched our Accelerate
Partner Program, and since then the response has been great. Our partners will now have access to a
turnkey solution that will allow them to brand our IaaS portal management, and we
at FiberMedia will take care of the back end support, billing. This will allow our partners to seamlessly offer
high quality Cloud services to their end users with the confidence of knowing that
these services are backed by FiberMedia’s years of experience.
What
trends are you seeing in Cloud services, data center colocation and hybrid
solutions?
From the technology
perspective, the sector has matured in many ways, and we’re seeing that instead
of proprietary ways of working with a Cloud provider or platform, the industry
is starting to open up and share.
Whether OpenStack or CloudStack, there is a lot of activity in
normalizing and using a common language on the platform side, which is allowing
adoption of the Cloud to grow and extend rather than creating silos.
While we are still
seeing growth on the Cloud and colocation side, we aren’t seeing a lot of
providers taking advantage of hybrid capabilities. You see many Cloud providers allowing for
cross connects, but they haven’t opened their doors. While that is a step in the right direction,
it is not as effective as having your servers physically colocated in the same
place as the Cloud. When it comes to the hybrid solutions, we want
to push ourselves because we have the ability to offer the compelling solutions
that benefit mid-sized to large enterprises.
We are looking to put smaller nodes out in more locations.
On the colocation side,
we are seeing that it is becoming somewhat commoditized. However, options such as our FlexColo service
are continuing to gain traction in the market.
We’re seeing more and more requests for metered power from customers,
especially from those customers requiring less than 10 cabinets. This is fueling our growth.
We
hear a lot about “Cloud”. From your
perspective what is the Cloud and what are the benefits of a Cloud-based
Solution?
Many service providers
use the term “Cloud” and that has created a lot of confusion in the market as
to what “Cloud” really is and what services are part of the Cloud. FiberMedia provides Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS). From our perspective,
the Cloud is more of a utility type offering where you are turning up services
through an online portal, and we view that as a “low touch” means of
service. With that type of approach there
is not a lot of hand holding, and perhaps not a lot of support provided to the
client. FiberMedia provides our client
base a trusted partner to work with and more of a consultative approach to
design. We provide more hand holding
from a solution perspective and our designs are backed by years of experience
offering these types of solutions. Our
clients confidently trust us to manage their environment, and that trust is not
misplaced.
What
are some important factors that should be considered when sourcing data center
colocation, Cloud, and hybrid solutions?
Some things to consider
include asking the following questions:
·
Are you working with a partner that you
can trust?
·
Is the provider working with you towards
a common goal?
·
Are the people you are interacting with
in the pre-sales process going to be the same ones you work with post sale?
·
Can this provider adapt and evolve as
your needs change, and do they offer the breadth of services you need to
efficiently operate your environment?
·
Can the provider offer you a custom
tailored solution designed to support your needs?
At FiberMedia, we take
the time to understand your needs and business challenges and design a custom
tailored solution that will support your organization today and into the
future. We don’t build out cages and
power in advance and force fit our clients into a standard configuration. Because of this approach, we have the ability
to build a custom hybrid environment dedicated to a client. The solution could encompass colocation, Cloud
with dedicated hardware and virtual machines and dedicated storage components. Our approach is all about flexibility and
customization that provides our clients with the infrastructure necessary to
succeed.
Another
key factor is data center location. FiberMedia’s data centers are strategically
located throughout the New York Metropolitan and Cleveland areas making
FiberMedia an attractive choice for businesses.
From a backup perspective, our Cleveland
data center is an ideal site to support our northeast footprint, and we have strong
connectivity between our data centers to ensure a seamless transition should it
be required.
What
would you say to companies interested in the types of solutions FiberMedia
offers but haven’t yet contacted FiberMedia?
FiberMedia
has been the one-source infrastructure support solution for mid-sized and large
enterprise clients in financial
services, healthcare, media and IT
for more than a decade. Our clients rely on our
highly secure, redundant network of strategically located data centers offering
geographic diversity and enhanced protection, each one designed to function as
both a primary and disaster recovery site.
If you are looking for
a trusted provider that will put your interests first as well as one that is
capable of providing a full breadth of managed services, and
if you are looking for a provider that is offering a solid data center
environment backed by high quality service and support, then look no further FiberMedia
is the data center provider for you.
Working with FiberMedia,
you are not going to get “lost in the in the shuffle”. At FiberMedia, we take a consultative approach
and work with you one-on-one to understand your needs and design a solution
best suited to support your organization.
Taking a consultative
approach, providing high quality service and support and earning your trust -
that’s what FiberMedia is all about.
What’s
next for FiberMedia?
Today
FiberMedia is a regional company with great financial partners. We plan to build on this solid foundation to
expand our physical footprint nationally and continue to grow our suite of
services either organically or through partnerships with best-in-class providers.
From colocation to managed services as well as on the Cloud side, you’ll see
enhancements throughout 2013 and beyond. The team is focused on getting to the
next level, and that growth is right at our door step.
Where
can prospects learn more about FiberMedia?
For more information on FiberMedia, please visit
our website at www.fibermedia.net or by
following FiberMedia on Twitter and LinkedIn.
No comments:
Post a Comment