C Infinity

As a Software as a Solution (SaaS) provider you see a number of benefits for your service to your customers over the traditional on-site installation.  The customer can instantly access an online, mobile and scalable solution without investing in skills and infrastructure.  Their business can adapt to market opportunities and threats without any IT related delays.
The same opportunities are available to the SaaS providers if they choose to deploy their online presence with C Infinity’s private cloud.

Choosing Dedicated Servers

Choosing to deploy your application on dedicated servers means that you have complete control over and administrative access to your servers.  Instead of being limited like you are on shared hosting, you specify how the server is configured – don’t worry, we’re there to help.  If it’s a Linux machine you get SSH access as a root user.  If it’s a Windows machine you get RDP access as administrator.  This access is protected by tunnelling your administrative control within a secure VPN tunnel.  That means we don’t open access to the Internet; we only open up access to your elected staff members who have access to use the VPN connection with a username and password.

When it comes to specifying the servers then we look at your requirements.  Whether you need virtual machines, physical servers or a mix of both, we can do it.  They can all work together.

Rapid Availability

With the C Infinity private cloud we can deploy private networks that are protected by clustered firewalls and servers that are customised to your needs in a short period of time.  For you, there is no lengthy process to specify and order hardware, no negotiations with multiple hardware vendors and no waiting around while equipment is ordered.  You simply talk to us and we work with you to find the appropriate solution for your scalability and security needs and according to your budget.

Security

All security starts, not at the firewall, but at the front door.  That’s why C Infinity placed it’s footprint in the best data centre in Europe, not just some budget computer room in an office building.  A 24 hour onsite presence, with access control lists enforced by photo ID and passwords, biometric access and pervasive video surveillance ensure that nobody gets access to our servers or your data without consent.

Using the best network equipment such as Cisco ASA firewalls with access rules that we work with you to define gives you the peace of mind that your systems are secure while online.

We also have centrally managed patch deployment and antivirus systems to ensure that your servers are kept up to date with the latest security updates.

Scalability

C Infinity’s private cloud allows you to adopt the “use what you need; pay for what you use” approach.  When you’re establishing a new online presence the best approach is to start out with what you need now and for the immediate future.  Why deploy 1TB of disk for a database when it might only be 50GB now.  With our scalable architecture, more disk, RAM and servers are only a few clicks away.  So instead of blowing your early budget before you have customers to pay for it, spend what you can afford and know that you can grow as you need to.

Management and Expertise

You’re a software developer and service provider.  Your primary focus is on developing your product, finding customers and securing investment.  The last things you want to be worrying about are data centres, servers, storage, firewalls … all that IT infrastructure stuff.  You’re after a stable platform that you can use a reliable foundation for your service.

That’s a great start but you need IT infrastructure expertise to partner with you on your venture.  You could hire in expensive skills.  Or you could host with C Infinity and avail of our already existing expertise and management systems to ensure that you engineer your infrastructure according to best practices, you run it properly and that you have the systems to manage it.  Who’s going to know if that network card fails at 2am?  Who’s going to know if a database service fails?  Will you be prepared when your web server starts to run out of memory during the December shopping bonanza?  With C Infinity you know that our engineers are always on the case.  Our management systems scan everything they can discover and alert you and us when there’s something out of the norm happening.

You gain access to our monitoring system.  This means you can see everything that’s going on in our infrastructure.  That’s important because alerts can be infrastructure or application related and you need to be fully informed.  You’ll see all the live performance monitoring and we can generate reports for you.  That’ll allow you to plan and budget for future demand and growth using real intelligence instead of traditional finger-in-the-air “guess-timations”.

Fault Tolerance

All of our network equipment and servers have A+B network and power with separate circuits.  That means that we can lose ½ of our power supply and everything stays operational.  The same goes for our SAN.  Every server has 2 independent paths to the SAN.  It has pairs of switches and controllers with RAID across all of the disks.

And speaking of outages, our data centre has a 100% power and network SLA with a track record to back it up.  Since opening the doors in 2001 they haven’t had an outage.  Our Internet connectivity providers also provide a 100% SLA.

Machine virtualisation creates a server that is independent of the hardware.  By running these virtual machines on a hardware cluster we can isolate your servers from hardware faults.

Backup and Recovery

As a professional secure online backup service provider we understand the needs to back up your business data.  All too often back up procedures seem to end there.  With C  Infinity you get a system that encrypts your data before it ever leaves your servers.  Data is continually backed up throughout the day in a manner that is efficient for the server and the network.  Your data is stored in triplicate on 3 independent servers and disk storage units.  That means your data can be recovered at any time without delay.  Finally, you get a 99.999% SLA on data recovery.  If we back it up, it will be there when you need to recover it.

Compliance

Complying with regulators can be tricky.  That’s something that C Infinity understands and provides a suitable hosting solution for.  We’re a 100% Irish company in a 100% Irish data centre.  If you’re storing personal data that is subject to regulatory compliance then your data cannot leave Irish shores.  Furthermore, you can’t even store it with a company that isn’t Irish.  For example, you could store it with an American company in an Irish facility but their requirement to comply with the USA Patriot Act will make you non-compliant.

We cap it all off by being registered with the Data Protection Commissioner.

Flexibility

The great thing about the C Infinity private cloud is the flexibility of the architecture.  No matter what your requirements are we have a way to host it:

• Disaster recover/business continuity site
• Hosted Small Business Server
• Software as a Service
• Traditional web server hosting
• Terminal Services or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

And there’s a variety of platforms we can use:

• Virtual machines on our virtualisation cluster
• Dedicated virtualisation implementations
• Blade servers
• Rack servers
• SAN storage
• Direct attach storage
• Dedicated or shared Internet connectivity
• Site-to-site VPN connections

We’ve carefully chosen our systems to ensure that we achieve this flexibility to build solutions that are suitable to your needs instead of the usual picking from a catalogue and trying to fudge that meets your requirements.

What Systems Do We Use?

Our data centre is the Data Electronics (DEG) facility in Dublin.  It was rated as the second best data centre in all of Europe in 2008.  All of our networking is based on Cisco hardware, e.g. firewalls, routers and switches.  We install them in pairs to get network fault tolerance.  Our servers and storage are from HP, purchased from a Hewlett Packard approved Irish vendor.  Our hardware is purchased with 4 hour support contracts from the hardware manufacturers in case the worst does happen.

For more information please complete the following form and submit: