The Internet Solution`s (IS) Hosting division, the business unit providing dedicated corporate and enterprise web and ASP hosting services, is making use of approximately 500 Dell servers as one of the cornerstones of its corporate hosting business in both Johannesburg and Cape Town A plethora of local top tier organisations and international .com companies use these services.
Hosting services are becoming more and more mission-critical as companies deploy their businesses online. With sites providing such services as online transactions, customer relationship management, e-procurement and share trading the demands on Hosting providers to guarantee 100% uptime and availability of all service components are intense.
"Customers using our hosting services as the basis for their online businesses expect maximum availability and uptime and we need to offer reliable server hardware tied into a redundant network architecture, with good service and support agreements in place," says Greg Payne, GM of IS Hosting. Dell`s ability to deliver according to specified lead times gives IS Hosting the ability to implement solutions according to strict lead times. . "In addition to this we keep spares on site, such as memory and hard drives, which further improves our service delivery to customers and minimises downtime should hardware components need replacing or upgrading," says. Payne.
"Once Dell delivers the server(s) to us we then perform a standard install on all the machines. This includes a base operating system and additional software systems for backup services, web statistics and remote administration. We have grown from about 10 or 20 servers three years ago to a total of about 500 today and Dell has played a major part in supporting that rapid growth," says Payne He adds: "We host our firewall systems on Dell servers too, for those customers who require a firewall to create a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) for secure hosting."
Dell forms an integral component in the IS Hosting backup architecture where the company uses the servers as the platform for a high end back up solution. "In fact our backup, maintenance and remote administration servers are in nearly all cases Dell servers and our Payment Gateways are housed on redundant Dell servers for our SET-based transaction systems. In addition, our web-statistics servers are Dell machines.
IS Hosting services the majority of South Africa`s high volume sites - those that serve in the region of a terabyte of information each month. Payne says: "Where an online business of this scale is concerned, server hardware forms such a vital component of the end to end service that we can take no chances. Our demands are clear: we need exceptional service, fast delivery, an extremely reliable product, choice from a spectrum of servers to suit our customers and all this at a fair price. Dell has been able to live up to these requirements admirably."
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