Cloud Infrastructure Service

Benefits

• Improve cost management: reduce CAPEX and take advantage of a subscription-based service
• Enhance productivity: get a high-availability, flexible IT infrastructure that won't let you down
• Stay in control: scale IT resources in line with changing business needs
• Simplify innovation: rapidly provision a self-managed test-and-development environment; easily convert it to a fully supported production environment

Key features

• Self-service portal lets you create and manage your own servers
• Physical servers are available for applications unsuited to virtualisation
• Catalogue of operating systems and software enables creation of server templates
• Underlying network, servers and hardware are managed, operated and monitored by Colt
• Fully managed service option offers server provisioning, software monitoring and patch management by Colt

Colt's Cloud Infrastructure Service puts you in control of a flexible computing environment that's hosted in a secure Colt data centre and provided on a subscription basis.

A self-service portal lets you quickly create physical and virtual servers and manage them in line with business needs. Once provisioned, a server is ready for use as though it were in your own data centre.

The Cloud Infrastructure Service is ideal for both test-and-development and production environments. You can use it, for example, to develop a new application, assess moving an application into a cloud environment, or test a new operating system. And once testing and development are complete, you can smoothly transition to a production environment.

For a production environment, you may prefer us to manage your Cloud Infrastructure Service for you, so that we take care of the server provisioning, software monitoring and patch management on your behalf.

Subscription-based service

When you subscribe to the service, we reserve an agreed minimum amount of compute resources and make them permanently available for your use. You also subscribe to an overall upper limit that you pay for only if you use it.

We'll help you work out the size and quantity of virtual and physical servers you'll need, and set up templates for them on the self-service portal to accelerate provisioning.

Colt's Cloud Infrastructure Service is based on a suite of modules that can be combined to provide a solution that meets your business requirements. The modules cover networking; network traffic and security; compute resources; storage; a systems and software catalogue; backup service and self-service portal.

You can connect to your Cloud Infrastructure Service using a private network access service, such as Colt IP VPN, or via the Internet.

Colt consultancy services are available to help you plan your migration to the Cloud Infrastructure Service.

Networking

This covers Internet connectivity for your physical and virtual servers, the bandwidth for site-to-site VPN connections, VLANs, and the IP addresses your servers need to support your applications.

Network traffic and security

We provide a dedicated virtual firewall, load balancing, and network and directory services integration.

Compute resources

Dedicated physical servers are supplied with options for the number of CPU sockets, cores, memory size and disk space. Virtual servers are supplied with options for the number of vCPUs, memory size, and disk space; and are provisioned in a high-availability environment with built-in redundancy. Physical servers are suitable in cases where virtualised servers could affect an application's performance, or for software whose licensing agreement is unsuited to a virtual environment.

Systems and software catalogue

Our catalogue offers Colt-licensed operating systems (Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers) and software such as web servers, application servers and databases. We can combine variants of operating systems and software to create blueprints that are provided as templates for you to deploy to your servers.

Backup

We can provide you with backup capability for your physical and virtual servers via our Managed Backup Service.

Fully managed service

If you choose the fully managed Cloud Infrastructure Service, we will provision and manage your servers on your behalf in line with your requests; monitor your operating systems and software; and provide software patch and anti-virus and anti-spyware management.

Service management and support

We manage, operate and monitor the network, servers and storage hardware underpinning the Cloud Infrastructure Service.
If you opt for a fully managed service, we will monitor your operating systems and software 24x7 against a range of parameters covering, for example, server availability, CPU utilisation and network interfaces, analysing any alarms generated by our monitoring tools and taking appropriate action. We also manage deployment and maintenance of software patches and anti-virus and anti-spyware capabilities.

Colt works within an ITIL framework to ensure consistent processes and industry best practice.