Dedicated Infrastructure

Benefits

• Improve cost control: reduce CAPEX and use OPEX more efficiently
• Increase flexibility: rapidly scale IT resources in line with changing business needs
• Avoid obsolescence: get risk-free access to the latest technology developments
• Improve productivity: gain a high-quality, high-availability IT infrastructure that won't let you down

Key features

• Range of fully managed servers, load balancers and switches
• Rapidly deployable, state-of-the-art IT resources
• Expert monitoring and support 24x7
• A secure environment for your business-critical applications and data

Colt's Dedicated Infrastructure service provides the installation, management and support of servers, load balancers and switches. Combined with our network and facilities services, Dedicated Infrastructure forms the foundation of your data-centre solution and underpins delivery of your business-critical applications.

You'll get a reliable, cost-effective service that ensures:

• Highly available IT infrastructure
• A more flexible approach to infrastructure deployment than can typically be achieved in house
• Risk-free access to the latest technology innovations in support of business needs.

You'll reduce dependence on your own data centre space. Instead you can rely on our expertise to manage your service in one of our secure data centres, where cooling and power are optimised to reduce consumption and costs and help protect the environment.

The Colt Dedicated Infrastructure service includes the following fully managed infrastructure building blocks:

• Physical servers
• Virtual servers
• Load balancers
• Switches.

Servers and switching

Your servers can be specified and implemented with a choice of operating systems: Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris. High availability (HA) options are available with all of them to improve resilience.

We provide wire-speed fast Ethernet and/or Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for your Dedicated Infrastructure solution. We manage the connectivity and switching between your servers, firewalls and load balancers and the infrastructure's front- and back-end distribution architecture.

For additional resilience you can opt for high-availability switching based on dual switches providing active/active redundancy capabilities.

Load balancing

Load balancers improve the delivery, availability and performance of your applications by distributing client sessions over multiple servers using IP traffic management. Several load-balancing options are available, depending on your requirements:

• Round robin (simple and weighted)
• Least connections (simple and weighted)
• Observed (balance of least connections and best response times).

High-availability load balancing is also available, based on dual load balancers providing active/passive redundancy capabilities.

Service monitoring

We provide 24x7 monitoring of your service, including analysis and resolution of alarms and warnings generated by our monitoring tools. We work within an ITIL framework to ensure consistent processes and industry best practices.