The Right Mix of Hosting, Storage and Security

- Brian Stillwell, senior director, solutions management, IT outsourcing, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company (www.savvis.com), says:

Posadas operates more than 102 hotel properties and 17,000 guestrooms in more than 50 different beach and urban destinations. The Mexico-based company provides a wide range of services to ensure its guests are met with fast and friendly service and its operations run smoothly.

It operates five unique hotel brands, including Live Aqua, Fiesta Americana Grand, Fiesta Americana, Fiesta Inn, and Hoteles One.

Challenge:

Posadas needed a more flexible, reliable and secure IT platform to help it manage a corresponding growing amount of data. As the business grows, the size of the information within its in-house data center also expands. The IT group found the costs required to manage the data becoming prohibitive. Meanwhile, the company expressed interest in implementing disaster recovery initiatives to recover lost data.

Posadas desired to outsource these IT requirements in order to avoid taking on additional permanent IT staff. The company also wanted to gain cost savings through the economies of scale that come with choosing a sophisticated outsourcer that would be able to combine multiple services.

Solution:

Posadas chose to work with Savvis, a CenturyLink company and an IT and could infrastructure leader. The hotel operator chose a full range of services, including managed hosting, storage, and dedicated servers. They chose Savvis for its ability to provide secure and available cloud-based hosting and responsive customer service. Savvis also partnered with Burstrom, a cloud infrastructure management firm, to develop an optimal cloud infrastructure implementation plan.

A core component of the infrastructure was Savvis Symphony Dedicated, a fully managed private cloud service. This solution allows enterprises such as Posadas to quickly scale its compute and storage resources in order to meet demand. Symphony Dedicated gives companies multiple public and private connection points while reducing the risks of failures.

Posadas also selected Savvis’ enterprise storage solution, which provides an accessible and scalable storage and disaster recovery platform that reduces the cost of ownership for enterprises of any kind. The solution reduces IT and management team and salaries while providing instant accessibility for any authorized user who needs to review, process or collect information.

Results:

Savvis’ managed hosting solutions allow Posadas’ staff to address its operations and improve company efficiencies instead of worrying about underlying infrastructure. Savvis’ managed hosting is an infrastructure-as-as-Service that features a dedicated service team to aid Posadas’ staff with any operational questions.

Savvis was able to quickly implement the Symphony Dedicated private cloud, seamlessly moving all of Posadas’ data center information without error. Savvis worked closely with Burstrom and Posadas to create an implementable cloud strategy in less than 120 days.

In order to protect against disaster, Posadas also chose enterprise storage from Savvis, providing the company with a safe repository for a massive amount of hotel-specific data, including information about all 102 properties and guest and marketing lists.

“We needed a cloud infrastructure provider that would be able to give us the right mix of hosting, storage and security at a reasonable cost to allow us to continue on our growth path,” said Leopoldo Toro Bala, CIO at Posadas. “Moving to the cloud is the right choice for any enterprise that wants to stay competitive, and by choosing Savvis we have become more agile and have the peace of mind of knowing our data will always be available.”

An Innovative Approach to Managed Hosting

- Nathan Day, chief scientist at Softlayer Technologies (http://www.softlayer.com/), says:

One of SoftLayer’s driving principles is innovation — Our mantra is ‘Innovate or Die.’ We don’t focus on offering the lowest cost solutions; we strive to offer the most innovative solutions, which in turn brings customers the greatest value.

Take as an example SoftLayer Managed Hosting, a new service we’re launching this week.

A quick survey of the market tells us a number of key things about managed hosting in terms of the value proposition offered, as well as the challenges that it can present. The value proposition seems clear: Organizations that need their infrastructure managed and don’t have the internal resources to do so can either expand their IT capabilities or look externally to a service provider to take on the work. Many choose the second option because it is much faster and more cost effective than building an internal function. Elimination of infrastructure management responsibilities combined with a lower price would seem to deliver significant value.

So where’s the downside?

A typical managed services deal comes with a 3-5 year contract, often accompanied by an early termination fee. The end result: customer lock-in. If the service is not up to snuff, it is difficult to move to another provider.

This is great for the provider, but not so great for the customer. To make matters even less customer-centric, these deals tend to be “all or none” affairs. The service provider wants to add management fees to everything versus just those pieces that the customer wants managed. In addition to that, provisioning time can be horrendous. A managed environment typically takes anywhere from 10-15 business days before the customer can access the environment. That’s a painful length of time when you compare it with the five minutes it takes to provision a SoftLayer cloud instance and the 2-4 hours it takes to get a dedicated box online and ready for you.

Understanding the competitive landscape, we decided to take a different approach with our Managed Hosting: The innovative approach.

Instead of a 10-15 day provisioning window, we’ll have your managed environment up and running within one (1) business day of ordering.

From a contract perspective, we are confident enough in our service to offer a month-to-month terms. If you don’t like the service or if we can’t deliver, you should be free to find a provider that meets your needs — no penalties incurred. Isn’t it time to expect a provider to earn your business each month? This arrangement also makes managed hosting feasible for short-term needs and applications.

Additionally, SoftLayer Managed Hosting is not “all or none.” We’ll manage only the pieces of the solution that you want managed.

And to top everything off, it just so happens that we can deliver these solutions at a price point lower than anyone else in the market because of the platform’s flexibility.

In this case, innovation brings customers the greatest service value AND the best price!