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Data Center Private Cloud Services

CITADEL100 offers its customers enterprise class IaaS private cloud services through our inhouse partnership with Egenera – the industry leader in cloud and data center infrastructure management software.

About Egenera

Egenera is a world leader in cloud and data center infrastructure management software for OEM and cloud infrastructure platforms. Egenera offers a range of software products that provide support for physical, virtual and cloud environments with enterprise-level scalability and reliability. Our industry leading software PAN Cloud Director (PCD) and PAN Manager provide enterprises and service providers with a simple yet powerful way to quickly design, deploy and deliver cloud services.

Company Highlights:

• Market leader in the cloud Management and data center software technologies

• 24/7/365 ‘follow-the-sun’ Global Technical Support

• Egenera manage mission-critical systems for 1000+ customers and 1600 installations worldwide

• 50 partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies including Citrix, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP and VMware

• Customers include world leading cloud service providers, banks, financial services, healthcare organisations and government agencies, including:

 

Silverline – IaaS Private Cloud

Egenera manage an enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) private cloud service called Silverline . Through the graphical drag-and-drop self-provisioning portal, partners can design complete Back-Office IT environments online and ready to use within 30 minutes. These IT environments are networked groups of related servers and business applications in the cloud, similar to traditional on-premise IT configurations. The service is paid for on a monthly pay-as-you-go basis, so there are no upfront capital costs.

Private Cloud environments

Silverlines private cloud environments are fully scalable, can be accessed from anywhere, and are presented to the customer with the highest levels of security, reliability and local jurisdiction stored data.

The Silverline IaaS shared infrastructure platform supports single and multi-tenancy and guarantee your environment isolation from other customers. Egenera manage the underlying physical infrastructure and network components. End-users (or their IT partners) manage the operating systems, business applications, VPN access and the data layer.

You can quickly and easily tailor your Private Cloud environment through our self-provisioning graphical designer that enables you to add additional virtual servers, software and networking components as required (see PCD below).

Each IT environment comes with ticketing, monitoring, reporting, VPN, private IP addressing, managed switching, managed HA firewall, data transfer in/out, and hardware technology refresh all inclusive.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A premium Service Level Agreement (SLA) provides a high level of clearly defined metrics on service availability and performance with a 99.99% guaranteed uptime.

Data held in Local Jurisdiction

All data is held within local jurisdiction. The end-customer owns the data at all times and the location of your data is always known.

Global Technical Support (GTS)

Egenera provides a 24/7/365 global Technical Support service for the Silverline IaaS service. This global ‘follow-the-sun’ technical support applies across all Silverline IaaS customers at the underlying infrastructure and network layer. Technical support is available 24/7/365 via phone and/or Egenera’s bespoke Ticketing system called Point of View (POV).

POV Ticketing System

Our Ticketing System (POV) is a bespoke system designed for-purpose to support our full IaaS Infrastructure and network. POV is a password protected portal where customers can quickly and easily raise support tickets through a step-by-step process, with full access to Knowledge Base Articles, Technical White Papers etc. Each Support Ticket is issued with a unique Ticket Number for tracking purposes. Our Support staff are Level 3 and Level 4 Support Engineers with an average of 6 years tenure. You will liaise with these engineers directly. A dedicated Account Manager is assigned to all Silverline customers.

Server-state monitoring

Individual server status monitoring checks for ping connectivity to each server and proactively alerts partners and customer automatically.  If a server has hung, rebooted, gone offline (off the network) or has shutdown, a ticket will be automatically be raised and integrated into the POV ticketing system.

As well as confirming server availability, we can also provide web service monitoring confirming connectivity) and URL monitoring (confirming website availability), essentially confirming that your site is online and available.

Resource usage monitoring

Once built and running, each virtual machine comes with comprehensive monitoring as standard.  The service will monitor CPU utilization, Disk utilization and Memory Utilization to pre-defined thresholds.   This is displayed graphically in real-time within each Private Cloud environment.  Resource monitoring provides full graphical and historical reporting over different time periods.

 

Silverline Infrastructure

Silverline’s IaaS Private Cloud infrastructure consists of Enterprise-Class best-of-breed server technologies built around HP Bladeframe servers.  The use of blade technology enables the capability to add more resources (memory, processing, and storage) quickly and easily to allow for rapid expansion.

We provide a High-Availability at both the virtualization layer (VMware HA cluster) and the physical Hardware layer (using Egenera PAN Manager software to provide N+1 HA failover).

Virtualization platform

The underlying virtualization technology used is VMware to provide a Highly-Available (HA) cluster.  VMware vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity.

vMotion is a key enabling technology for creating the dynamic, automated and self- optimizing cloud platform.  Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS) automatically load balances resources across all hosts.

Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS) for storage load balances across the SAN storage.

PAN Cloud Director

Egenera’s PAN Cloud Director (PCD) software is the management interface used on the Silverline IaaS Private Clouds.  The designer has a simple to use drag-and-drop graphical interface allowing you to select from a catalogue of resources such as: Servers, CPU, Memory, Storage, Operating Systems, Business Applications, Firewalls, switches, networking, bandwidth etc to create your complete IT environment.

Simply press ‘Save & build’ and your complete Private Cloud environment its ready to use in 30 minutes.  PCD also allows you to build custom VMs and environments and store in your component library as templates for replication at a later stage.

Physical Blade Servers

As well as the ability to self-provision virtual servers, you can also self-provision dedicated physical blade servers through PCD.  A sophisticated hybrid environment of physical servers and virtual servers can be created simply using the drag-and-drop features.  Because the physical server is part of our bladeframe, it takes advantage of the virtualized networking components of the IaaS platform.  The blade can also avail of the N+1 High-availability capabilities provided by Egenera’s PAN Manager software.

So through the PCD graphical interfaces you can self-provision a hybrid cloud environment containing:

• Virtual Servers
• Physical Servers (Blades)
• Public Cloud (Amazon EC2)

….all through a single pane of glass.

 

Operating System and Application Licensing

Microsoft Licensing

Egenera have a Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) with Microsoft that enables us to provide and license the latest Microsoft software to provide software services and hosted applications to customers on a monthly pay-as-you-go basis.

This includes Microsoft Operating System and Business Application licenses and is typically either per-processor or per-user licensing.  Licensing functionality is built into PCD, so this can be self-provisioned through the PCD designer.  If a partner or customer has their own SPLA agreement with Microsoft then you have the option to use your own Microsoft SPLA.

Citrix Licensing

Egenera have a Citrix Service Provider (CSP) License Agreement with Citrix.  As with the Microsoft SPLA agreement above, you have the option to use Egenera’s Citrix CSP or your own CSP for Citrix licensing purposes on a monthly pay-as-you-go arrangement for the Citrix Applications and Virtual Appliances.

Connectivity & Networking

Our Network was designed to provide 100% availability of the Internet to your equipment.  The data networking connection has redundant connectivity via a fibre ring to/from multiple routers for redundancy.  Egenera has its own an (AS) Autonomous System Network which is a collection of connected IP routing prefixes under the control of one or more network operators presenting a clearly defined routing policy to the Internet.

There are separate physical links to and primary routing to/from three upstream providers: Level 3, INEX and Colt.   The data traffic takes the most efficient route available over these three networks.

Bandwidth

Within the designer, each environment consists of a Firewall with Internet access, Bandwidth and at least one switch.  This is pre-populated on the palette by default.  Bandwidth can be easily increased or decreased as appropriate using the slider in pre-set increments of 1Mb, 2Mb, 5Mb and 10Mb.  Additional bandwidth can be catered for on request.

At the backend Egenera provide fully meshed connectivity via Tier 1 uncontended symmetric carrier-grade meshed IP Transit. Each server is burstable to 1Gbps and usage is based on 95th percentile. If you consume more bandwidth than your monthly allocation you will be increased to the next bandwidth increment in the following month.

Firewalls

The Firewalls are managed in a Highly-Available configuration to control the incoming and outgoing network traffic provide the network security. We provide the appropriate firewall configurations and policies to ensure you have suitable public IP addresses that can easily scale. Silverline will also provide any required SSL/VPN connections as part of our service.

Switching

Data networking, switching, vLANs etc are provided via Cisco 6500 managed distributed switching.  PCD enables you to configure and build-out the backend and frontend networking as you would with an on-premise solution.  PCD will auto assign IP addresses and provides an automated email with the relevant networking and Virtual Machine login details.  The default configuration is no inter-vLAN access.  We guarantee environments will be isolated from other customers.

Data Segregation

Each private cloud environment is segregated and contained within its own dedicated VLAN (switch with /28 or /29 subnet) and dedicated IP address(es) with specific firewall policies required to allow traffic.  Default configuration is no inter-VLAN traffic allowed and no public Internet access to customer environment.  Irrespective of how the traffic flows, there must be a matching firewall policy in place or the traffic will be dropped.

Virtual Server Backup options

Silverline offers a number of internal and external VM and file-level backup options as additional services.  These options can be stacked as required.

VMDK and File-Level Backups

Silverline offers a number of backup options each one with various retention periods.  These options can be stacked as required.  Each option backs up the entire VM and provides both complete VM (VMDK-level) and file-level restore options.

• Option 1 – Daily Backup retained for 7 days
• Option 2 – Daily Backup retained for 30 days
• Option 3 – First day of the Month backup retained for 1 year

Simply drag the icon for backups (from external services tab) in the designer and this automatically opens a ticket to get the backup setup. An edit box will appear requesting the data amount in Gb required for back-up.  Input the size (in Gb) for each VM.

Each option backs up the entire VM and provides both complete VM (VMDK) and file-level restore options.  This allows you to be able to restore:

• restore individual files without Egenera intervention via a web portal
• restore a complete VM at a customer’s request via support ticket

 

Additional Storage volumes

Within the designer (under the ‘Extra Storage’ Tab) you can drag-and-drop a dedicated portion of storage to individual servers.  Customers can install their backup software of choice and use extra volumes of storage for their logs, backup/restore purposes etc.

• Additional Primary storage (Tier 1)
• Additional Secondary storage (Tier 2)

Off-site File-Level Backup

Within the designer (under the ‘External Services’ Tab) there is an option for an Off-site File-Level backup service.  The data is stored on physically separate storage within our Data centre.  Data is also immediately replicated offsite to a geographically separate location for redundancy.  Data is compressed and encrypted.  The service is charged at a per Gb per month cost.

Physical Blades: Highly Available (N+1 Failover)

Our underlying infrastructure has the additional benefit of utilizing Egenera’s PAN Manager software at the backend of the Silverline IaaS cluster to provide N+1 hardware failover and resilience for all the underlying physical blade Infrastructure.

PAN Manager works by abstracting the IT infrastructure to create manageable resource pools of servers, I/O, networking and storage.

PAN Manager provides full HA failover for the physical blade servers.  Effectively this virtualizes the hardware to provide ‘RAID5 for Blade Servers’.  The underlying infrastructure is capable of self-healing from numerous common faults including hardware failure, massive spikes in utilization, or connectivity loss to the internet or storage.

HA for Customer Dedicated Blades

As well as providing HA failover for the underlying Silverline Infrastructure, PAN Manager can be used to provide HA failover for dedicated customer physical blades within Silverline.  A blade is reserved within the bladeframe for customer HA and can be a 1:1 dedicated and uncontended HA Blade per customer or shared across multiple customers (4:1, 8:1 and 15:1 contention ratios).

So in effect this allows end-customers to further reduce capital investment to securely pool/share recovery servers, regardless of software workload, and without complex clustering products.  Configurations can be also shared for example with Test & Dev environments when they not required, dramatically reducing the cost of having to support and deliver two separate environments.

Mirroring / Disaster Recovery

Egenera can provide an optional DR Service where we provide a Highly-Available environment deployed across two redundant Data Centers in an active/passive configuration.  This allows you to design a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan for your cloud environment.

We can provide an SLA’d Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for your Disaster Recovery plan.  Our DR solution utilizes Egenera PAN Manager software (LPAN DR on PAN Manager).

 

Egenera Cloud Suite

Egenera PAN Cloud Director: a video overview of Egenera’s Cloud Management Software

Egenera PAN Manager: a video overview

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