Featuring six service layers, the SaaS Hotel infrastructure covers each aspect of successful SaaS delivery to ensure higher levels of performance and reliability for software vendors and end-users.
Explore each service layer below to find out how the SaaS Hotel environment can benefit your business — from a reliable foundation of datacentres and networking, through to a choice of global delivery points to ensure the most responsive experience for end-users.
Layer 1
SaaS Benefits:
End-user application experience and all-important vendor reputation is underpinned by datacentre reliability, whilst scalable off-site backup architectures are available to protect your data, and your customers' data.
Features:
With roots in hosting, ecommerce application serving and subsequent expansion into colocation services, the success of 1st Easy has been dependent on the selection of commercially resilient datacentres. Qualifying criteria include:
- Physical security: 24/7/365 on-site security, access control systems, VESDA fire suppression
- Resilient connectivity: multiple connections with major hubs
- Power availability: dual UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) power feeds and backup generators
- Environmental control: resilient air conditioning
By necessity, resilience is a factor taken very seriously by 1st Easy — downtime extending beyond just 30 minutes at any of our datacentres would invoke extensive costs in SLA compensation payments.
Layer 2
SaaS Benefits:
Secure, high performance point-to-point delivery between SaaS platform and end-users ensures a smooth, crisp experience, improving productivity and enhancing your credibility.
Features:
Highly specified datacentres, expert technical support and state of the art server architectures are important; the fact remains however, that the heaviest reliance in SaaS application delivery is the network driving it all. That's why 1st Easy have invested heavily in this area, including part acquisition of a network company.
Like the best, we peer directly with the best — the most important in the UK — and they reciprocate. This gets IP network packets from A to B via the most direct route, enhancing end-user application performance.
This strategy has proven most effective at meeting demanding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and is capable of coping with the severest of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Our dual fail-over firewall architecture has rarely lost the ability to deliver data packets to and from servers and further enhances security, without compromising the SLA levels.
Layer 3
SaaS Benefits:
Advanced network technology makes the deployment of SaaS far more reliable, secure, manageable and scalable to the global market.
Features:
Using network technologies from trusted suppliers such as Juniper Networks, F5 Networks, HP and Cisco, we provide protected, high availability and load balanced configurations, on both local and global scales.
We can add layers of additional control and security that perform the following functions:
- Application Local Traffic Management (LTM), optimisation and load balancing.
- Global Traffic Management (GTM) across multiple datacentre points of presence, ensuring constant application services, global delivery and automatic failover.
- Application Security Management (ASM) that significantly reduces the risk of data loss or damage and protects intellectual software property.
- Hardware web application acceleration, capable of improving performance by between two to ten times - reducing the need for costly hardware upgrades and improving the end user experience.
Layer 4
SaaS Benefits:
The latest high performance, energy efficient enterprise systems and SAN technologies ensure SaaS operations run smoothly, cost effectively, and with the minimum of impact on the environment.
Features:
As a direct Enterprise level customer and reseller of Dell Corporation, 1st Easy are able to source and deploy some of the most advanced and reliable server architectures available in the market today. These servers form the backbone of deployment of SaaS, delivering scalable performance, dual PSU reliability and high end configurations to support your applications.
Our adoption of Dell PowerEdge™ technology has introduced considerable improvements in power efficiencies, reducing by a third our server related power consumption. Quite aside from "riding the green bandwagon", the benefits of reduced power consumption are as much about moderating datacentre operating costs as protecting the environment.
As part of the strategy of virtualisation delivery, we have adopted the industry leading Storage Area Network (SAN) platform, based on EMC Corporation's CLARiiON™ CX4 product range. This SAN platform delivers "five nines" (99.999%) availability, high throughput SAN storage to your applications and servers, improving uptime and application database performance.
Our dual datacentre architecture allows full disaster recover procedures to be deployed, using EMC's MirrorView constant backup imaging at all data layers, without impacting on server (and hence application) performance.
Layer 5
SaaS Benefits:
Virtualisation improves application reliablity and introduces greater flexibility by allowing VPS resizing on demand and facilitates growth without expensive upgrades or downtime.
Features:
The deployment of SaaS is delivered via Virtual Private Servers (VPS):
- Instant (re)deployment and resizing provides the flexibility to respond to the fluid requirements of a SaaS environment.
- Power efficiency and utilisation of spare server capacities reduces the cost of deployment and provides a greener solution.
- Management of VPS is easier at large scales, allowing support services to easily identify servers requiring extra resources.
Two tiers of virtualisation are available according to requirements and budgets: VMware at enterprise-level (comprehensive functionality) and Open Source Citrix Xen technologies at entry-level (reduced, core functionality).
Layer 6
SaaS Benefits:
A co-operative set of standards to improve the business continuity of applications, implement disaster recovery procedures and simplify support call management on a global basis.
Features:
Working closely with large USA-based datacentre provider CoSentry, we have extended our SaaS Hotel platform to facilitate deployment in North America. This reciprocal arrangement allows UK and European software vendors to more effectively establish North American markets, whilst USA/Canadian based vendors can expand into Europe. Forthcoming links with datacentres in Australia and Asia will provide a truly global SaaS deployment platform for the lowest latencies at end-user level.
A coordinated CSSP standard provides datacentre support teams and software vendor clients with a unified platform that enables:
- 24/7/365 access and visibility to local support operations for clients and technicians
- Rapid resolution of issues
- Pooling of technical resources and knowledge
- Deployment of best technical skills to fix complex issues
- A single and consistent support workflow and process of resolution
- Interested? speak with one of our team by calling 0808 222 2221, or contact us online
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