IaaS

Scalable computing that flexes with the speed of your business

Business change is hard to predict, particularly in a challenging economy. Rigidly structured IT infrastructure cannot provide the flexibility that such business change demands.

Is your business growing at an unpredictable rate? Do you experience seasonal peaks in IT demand? Are you considering a merger or acquisition? Do you need a local service?

With IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) from Colt you can scale your IT infrastructure in line with your business. Upgrade/ downgrade on the go via Colt’s ISO27001 data centres underpinned by our enterprise grade data network.

Colt owns and manages over 20 data centres across Europe – where we were the first vCloud Virtual Datacentre Service Provider.  Our local presence and extensive experience means that your services, data and applications stay within your country, and are in line with the most rigorous local regulations.

Which IaaS is right for you?

Colt’s IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) services combine IT scalability with enterprise quality and commercial flexibility. Services can be configured and consumed from European data centres via different models tailored to your needs:

• If you need to spin up IT resources for immediate use and with minimal technical expertise, you can opt for our On-Demand IaaS services. These will allow you to scale resources up and down as needed, keep track of your resources and pay per server, per hour.
• If you need direct access to a pool of IT resources in order to build a self-managed infrastructure, you can opt for our vCloud Virtual Data Centre services. These will allow you to easily leverage internal and external IT resources and build hybrid cloud environments. You will have more visibility and control over the end-to-end infrastructure configuration.

We understand each business is different and we will help you decide on which IaaS service and management options are best fit for you – self-service, partially or fully managed.

When you require agility, flexibility, and an end-to-end range of infrastructure offerings, Colt delivers with quality, integrity and reliability.

Rapid access to IT when you need it

Scale up or down quickly with rapid access to IT services from Colt.

On-Demand IT infrastructure brings you the benefits of best in-class enterprise IT capability consumed as a simple instantly available service.  At the touch of a button you can upgrade your compute, storage and network resources to cope with extra load, and then downgrade when things slow down.

The service is ideal for application development and test teams or projects which have fluctuating demand or require rapid access to IT services for periods of a few months.

Gain a competitive advantage while maintaining a positive cash flow. Pay per use, per month without any long term contract commitments.

Benefits at a glance

Efficiency – gain greater control over IT capacity and spend

• A simple financial model, with running costs and software licences included and no major capex spend or long term contracts

Ease of use – plan, purchase and manage via an online portal

• Catalogue style purchasing via an online portal. Operating systems ready-installed and licensed. Remote management and clear separation of user rights

Predictability – plan around IT workload and budgets

• Monthly invoicing allows careful management of cashflow and internal cost management

Scalability – match business peaks and troughs

• Agile platform ready for both seasonality and the unexpected

Security – support business critical systems

• The performance, reliability and security to satisfy your own internal policies and regulations

Data Protection – match Recovery Point and Time Objectives to operational needs

• Enterprise Backup and Recovery as well as Virtual Replication services provide a full data protection capability for On-Demand IaaS

High performance storage – ensure flexibility and consistency

• Transparent migration between storage tiers with a guaranteed performance per tier 

Limited by your in-house infrastructure? Access additional compute, memory, storage and networking power from a trusted source.

vCloud Virtual Data Centre from Colt delivers additional resource via an enterprise class infrastructure as, when and where you need it – at a significantly lower cost than a  proprietary approach.

Benefits at a glance:

The storage performance that you want

• With multiple tiers of storage available to choose from, you can mix and match the storage tiers to match your business requirements

Cut costs and limit capex

• Simple financial model with running costs and software licences included

Meet the most stringent internal service requirements

• Guaranteed resource availability

Manage and customise

• Enhanced Networking options and self-service back-up and replication features
• Create a hybrid cloud model to suite your business requirements

Choice of datacentre location

• Largest VMware vCloud footprint in Europe
   

   vCloud Backup

Gain peace of mind and protect business continuity with a robust backup solution. Colt’s unique self-service vCloud Backup feature allows complete control over the backup of business data:

• Decide which Virtual Machines in your vCloud environment are backed up by a customisable schedule
• Select the retention period of schedule backups
• Replicate backups to another Colt data centre for added protection
• Run adhoc backups, and implement image level and file level restores of Virtual Machines

Replication

Create and manage your own disaster recovery solution. Colt’s vCloud Replication service allows on-premise replication to a Colt vCloud Virtual Data Centre, or between two Colt vCloud data centres.

The service enables replication of production workloads into a Colt vCloud environment in a near-synchronous fashion.

Automate business continuity and disaster recovery

• Powered by Zerto Virtual Replication 3.0 hypervisor based replication

Determine robustness

• Ability to test failovers, real failovers and failbacks

Be selective

• Choose to replicate the most business critical data

Simplify deployment

•  Software automated installation

Replicate any storage

•  Hardware agnostic solution compatible with all current storage systems