Stack’s Comprehensive Hosting Service should not be thought of as the same as co-location or server hosting which businesses have used in the past to attempt to reduce IT infrastructure cost.

Co-location and server hosting have generally proved surprisingly expensive as they are no more than a collection of individual client environments that just happen to be in one place.

 

This approach frequently places these services beyond the commercial reach of small businesses as the price can be surprisingly high especially when the administration costs are included.

 

By providing a platform built on the Market leading VMware Virtualisation technology hosted on Enterprise Servers using EMC storage arrays and Asigra Data Vaulting backup all replicated between data centres an Enterprise environment of Tier 1 providers is created. Because these services are physically "pooled" but "securely isolated" the cost of the investment can be shared across the subscriber base thus significantly lowering the price to businesses.

 

The purpose built facilities are protected by physical security measures designed by the Crime Prevention Unit and Merseyside Fire and Civil Defence Authority. These measures include external and internal CCTV systems monitoring the perimeter of the buildings and key internal locations within each environment. The CCTV is continuously monitored by Stack Security Operations Centre (SSOC) engineers and recorded in HD digital format.

 

Building ingress is controlled by an electronic access system linked to central station monitoring and to Police and Fire services less than two miles distant from both locations. Both sites are situated outside of flood plains and are in very low risk seismological terrains. Physical and "Cyber" Intrusion Detection and Prevention services run continuously on all connections to the centres with your choice of Anti-Virus in addition to ours.

 

By providing UPS and hot-standby generator support for mains supply together with multiple independent cooling our wholly owned, secure, purpose built data centres give customers the peace of mind and confidence that their applications and data are available 24 x 7 x 365.

 

Diverse Internet connectivity with failover triangulation between data centres protects against outages.

 

With robust security in place and with high availability, Stack is delivering a secure enterprise class hosting service at a fraction of the usual cost.

 

Contact Stack to find out just how much you can save by moving services to our Cloud.

 

　

 

Recently one of our support engineers experienced an odd technical “Gotcha”. A customer reported that he could VNC onto all of his co-located servers but one and asked us to investigate.

When organisations grow they often do so physically as well as in staff numbers. The consequence of this is that IT networks usually grow in the same way. Desks, phones and workstations proliferate requiring additional cabling and more switch ports.

It is unusual for IT to have the luxury of redesigning and reconfiguring the network to accommodate this growth according to industry best practices. More likely they are asked to “bolt on” some additional kit to facilitate the growth at the lowest cost and in the shortest time. After all growth is vital but always attracts cost.

Stack Data Solutions were recently commissioned to discover why at a major Premier League football ground, a near perfectly designed Wi-Fi system collapsed during matches.

Armed with a laptop with an Atheros wireless chipset capable and running Network Instruments Observer 14.1, we first analysed the airwaves on a non-match day.