Hosting.com Launches Business Continuity Solution to Guarantee an Always On Infrastructure for Mission-Critical Applications

Denver, CO (PRWEB) February 17, 2011

Hosting.com, the leading provider of cloud hosting and recovery services, today announced the release of its Critical Availability Service (CAS). CAS introduces the hosting industrys most comprehensive application-centric SLA (Service Level Agreement) to ensure the mission-critical applications and infrastructure of Hosting.com clients are secure, cloud-enabled and Always On.

The Critical Availability Service (CAS) has three main components: a high availability infrastructure, Entourage support and the Critical Availability Service SLA. The high availability infrastructure is delivered from one of Hosting.coms geographically-dispersed datacenters and leverages the Hosting.com CAS reference architecture consisting of five managed services: dedicated firewalls, load balancing, backups, advanced monitoring and patching. The combination of the five managed services provides every customer the infrastructure necessary to ensure their applications are always available and Hosting.com guarantees it.

The Critical SLA is unparalleled in the hosting industry because it is based on application availability not component type. Typically, service provider SLAs only reimburse clients for downtime associated with a single component of their solution. The CAS SLA takes it one step further by paying double the normal payout for the entire solution when the application is unavailable. CAS is supported by the Hosting.com Entourage team which is a small group of highly trained and dedicated server engineers assigned to specific customer groups.

Craig McLellan, Hosting.com Chief Technology Officer, added, From years of experience, we know when most companies think of Disaster Recovery they plan for catastrophic disasters (i.e., tornado, earthquake, hurricane) and focus on validating that they could recover. However, companies are more likely to encounter a clinical disaster (i.e., viruses, human error, malicious attack) which can be avoided through availability centric offerings. He continued, Hosting.com tested, validated and has now certified that our CAS configurations will provide a cost-effective business continuity solution to help companies avoid clinical disasters and ensure their mission-critical applications are available 24x7x365.

Hosting.coms CAS configurations are also available in cloud environments. Hosting.coms recently released 2011 Cloud Trends and Best Practices Report revealed that 43% of companies will turn to cloud infrastructure to gain access to more robust high availability and recovery services. In addition, the report revealed that the number of companies implementing cloud to complement their BCDR strategy will grow by 5x over the next 18 months.

John Morency, Research Vice President of Systems, Security & Risk for Gartner Research, commented, Having a continuously available IT infrastructure is a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable business resiliency. Recovery-in-the-Cloud services have the potential for making the delivery of highly available IT services achievable for a large number of businesses, many of whom could not afford to do so using more traditional infrastructure- and service-based approaches.

Join Hosting.com on March 3, 2010 for the 2011 Cloud Trends and Best Practices Webinar to learn how SaaS organizations and those pursuing SaaS solutions have implemented high availability for their mission-critical business applications.

About Hosting.com

Hosting.com is a global provider of enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions, services and facilities that ensure clients mission-critical applications are cloud-enabled and Always On. Hosting.coms geographically-dispersed datacenters and Cloud Supersites, coupled with the industrys top networking and connectivity technologies, provide the highest levels of availability, security, and responsiveness. The most recognized names in SaaS, Healthcare, Retail, Financial Services, and Government rely on Hosting.coms business continuity, managed cloud hosting, and colocation solutions.

Hosting.com currently operates PCI Level 1 cloud and dedicated infrastructures and SAS 70 Type II certified datacenters in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO.

All Hosting.com products and services are supported by 24x7x365 live expert technical support through toll-free telephone, email, and online chat.

###

Hosting.com Launches Business Continuity Solution to Guarantee an Always On Infrastructure for Mission-Critical Applications

OnRamps Colocation Services Guarantee 100% Uptime for Companies Threatened by Anticipated Disruptions to the Texas Power Grid

Austin, TX (PRWEB) June 27, 2012

OnRamp Access, an Austin-based data center operations company, provides colocation services to businesses in the Texas region that cannot afford the potential loss of power projected by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) as energy use in the state continues to reach new heights. A recent study released by ERCOT, the grid operator for most of Texas, anticipates potential electricity shortages within the coming decade as a result of the insufficiencies in power output and increased demand expected for the region in the next few years. In 2011, ERCOT narrowly avoided power grid failure by rotating outages in the winter and issuing six conservation alerts when summer heat reached record highs.

The Capacity, Demands and Reserves (CDR) Report, released by ERCOT in late May 2012, predicts a decreased electric generation capacity and higher peak demand of energy usage by as early as 2014. This creates a lower target planning reserve margin than required by 2010s standards for contingencies, which includes positive economic status and high summer temperatures as catalysts for increased energy consumption. The cause for concern is the related brownouts and potential blackouts associated with a power grid under such stresses. To heighten the severity of this situation, ERCOT believes this problem will worsen in the following year and continue in a trend of increasingly negative reserve margins foreseeably until 2022. As in the case of the outages experienced last year, server downtime translates to missed revenue opportunity for businesses running e-commerce websites and major concerns for healthcare providers in need of accessing critical patient data in an emergency. OnRamps state-of-the-art data center was designed with redundancy, reliability and security in mind, enabling it to withstand extensive power outages. These considerations allow OnRamp to offer colocation customers a 100% uptime guarantee.

Without an adequate supply of power, it is hard to guarantee the reliability of systems and accessibility of data maintained through an in-house data storage operation, said OnRamps Founder Chad Kissinger. OnRamp boasts several advantages in the maintenance and delivery of power required for its clients racks, which provides assurance for its customers considering the future straining of the power grid expected from the region.

The individual components which support the data centers operation allow the company to mitigate risks of power fluctuations, such as brownouts, for its clients. All distortions to utility power are removed by sending them through one of OnRamps Uninterruptable Power Sources (UPSs) to undergo a double conversion process. This ensures that electrical output power from the UPS is completely clean, computer grade power. In addition, OnRamp uses Power Distribution Units (PDUs) to act as step down transformers and circuit breakers to provide basic shock protection to these systems.

While other data centers and many in-house data storage facilities account only for enough backup power to ensure their servers remain up and running, OnRamp maintains its complete environment with enough backup power supply to keep the entire data center functioning in the event of temporary power loss. This means, with record breaking summertime temperatures, OnRamp is prepared to keep its clients systems completely stable by meeting both power infrastructure and cooling needs.

OnRamp is fed from a high priority power substation dedicated to serving the AMD Semiconductor factory, the VA Hospital, and the new Austin Energy control center. In addition to this advantage, the company operates at an (n+1) level of redundancy, meaning it provides a minimum of one additional critical mechanical component for each of its power, A/C, internet connectivity, network connections and various other systems. This enables the company to remove a single component for service and repairs while continuously running its operation at full capacity 24/7/365.

About OnRamp

OnRamp was founded in 1994 in Austin, Texas. As one of Texas first Internet operations companies, OnRamps history is rooted in providing reliable and secure connectivity that enables distributed computing. Today, OnRamp is a data center operations company that delivers colocation, managed hosting, cloud and disaster recovery services backed by Full7Layer Support.

Related Disaster Recovery And Backup Services Press Releases

OnRamps Colocation Services Guarantee 100% Uptime for Companies Threatened by Anticipated Disruptions to the Texas Power Grid