Infrastructure
The Bedrock Of Hosted Exchange
Now that you’ve made the decision to move from on-premise to hosted, you’re confronted with a myriad of hosted Exchange solution provider options. If price were the only differentiator, you’d go with latest free option and call it a day. But in order to choose the provider that’s right for your organization, you need to look at more than just their price point.
The infrastructure upon which an Exchange provider offers its services is the bedrock of their business. Simply put, it is the true test of their ability to meet or exceed your service expectations. Any evaluation of a potential provider must therefore include a thorough assessment of the infrastructure behind their service offering.
This white paper highlights the distinct advantages inherent in a hosted vs. an on-premise infrastructure. It then offers specific questions to ask and consider in your evaluation and selection of a hosted Exchange provider’s infrastructure. The paper concludes with the distinguishing features of the infrastructure at Intermedia.
“A third party is managing the entire backend infrastructure, thereby minimizing the impact of major and minor services outages and the ensuing loss of email that can impact any business.”
—Osterman Research, The Case for Hosted Exchange
Hosted VS. On-Premise Infrastructure: A World Apart
If you’re like most organizations, you pride yourself on the quality and performance of the on-premise infrastructure you’ve maintained to support your business. Whether you’re a small to mid-size business, or large organization, hosted infrastructure offers considerable advantages over on-premise. These include a reduced administrative burden, significantly better redundancy, performance and scalability and the ability to reprioritize in-house IT staff on more strategic assignments.
One of the most common misconceptions about hosted Exchange is that it is more costly to deploy and operate than an on-premise infrastructure. Osterman Research’s cost models have demonstrated that an on-premise, 100-seat Exchange deployment costs nearly $40 per seat per month over a three-year system lifetime, while a 1,000-seat deployment costs just over $24 per seat per month. Most hosted Exchange services price significantly less than these on-premise costs.
Another advantage of hosted infrastructure is the speed with which it can scale to support additional users. As the customer, supporting a crop of new users is as simple as a phone call to your provider. No scrambling to order, configure and deploy the additional servers necessary to support the increased user workload. Moreover, these costs are predictable, unlike the unpredictable costs inherent in administering and scaling an on-premise infrastructure.
The reality is that the breadth and depth of a hosted Exchange infrastructure is typically well outside the reach of most on-premise IT budgets. In fact, depending on the hosted Exchange provider you choose, you could actually achieve all the scalability and reliability benefits of a Fortune 500-caliber infrastructure at a fraction of the cost to build a comparable implementation on-premise.
Questions To Ask And Consider
As you compare and contrast the offerings of different hosted Exchange providers, here are some potential questions to ask and consider in your selection process:
Datacenters
- Where are their datacenters located in relation to where your users reside?
- How many datacenters do they operate?
- Can you choose which datacenter is used to host your services so you can minimize the roundtrip time your emails have to travel?
The ‘Plumbing’
- Whose servers, network and storage solutions do they use?
- What is their telecommunications architecture?
- Can they offer any documentation of their server/network performance and/or reliability?
Uptime and Service Level Agreements
- How much downtime can you truly afford?
- What’s the provider’s track record for meeting/exceeding their SLAs? How quickly are issues reported to their customers, if at all?
Infrastructure At Intermedia
At Intermedia, the premium infrastructure behind our solutions is built on more than a decade of Exchange hosting experience. This enables us to offer a 99.999 percent financially-backed uptime SLA — that’s less than six minutes of downtime per year. To ensure we consistently meet or exceed the service expectations of our more than 450,000 users, we never stop investing in infrastructure. Let’s take a closer look at how Intermedia’s infrastructure distinguishes us from other hosted Exchange providers.
Data Replication.
In addition to running regular backups, Intermedia replicates Exchange 2010 data in real time from one set of premium hardware to another. This protects the critical information your business keeps within Exchange, even in the event of hardware failure or database corruption. It also enables Intermedia to rapidly restore the full functionality of your Exchange environment should an issue occur.
Multiple premium datacenters.
Intermedia operates five premium datacenters - four that are geographically dispersed between the East and West coasts of the United States and one in the UK. Our datacenters enable us to guarantee low latency and improved application performance. Each datacenter is serviced by multiple Tier-1 Internet providers, including Sprint, Level 3, Uunet (Verizon Business) and Global Crossing. This represents four of the top six Internet providers. Our multi-provider approach ensures optimal routing to client end points which in turns reduces latency. This also enables us to dynamically route around Internet service availability issues from any one provider without compromising the service we deliver to our customers.
‘Choose your datacenter’ option.
For those organizations that have a specific business need that warrants it, Intermedia lets you choose the datacenter closest to your users to ensure your data travels the shortest, fastest route possible. This is beneficial, for example, if you need to support a distributed work force with hosted Exchange services.
Multi-million dollar, continually upgraded hardware.
Best-in-class servers, storage and network hardware from Dell, EMC and Cisco are the cornerstone of our infrastructure. For example, each datacenter operates redundant Cisco 6509 carrier class switches with firewall and load balancing modules. Built for availability and throughput, this flagship technology virtually eliminates disconnects due to server availability or network issues. The load balancer modules perform scripted health checks of the client access servers to guarantee application availability. They will dynamically remove a server from the pool if it is not available. All server pools have a minimum of N+1 availability.
SAS 70 Type II compliance.
Intermedia submits itself to rigorous SAS 70 Type II audits at a datacenter and company level on an annual basis. This thorough report validates the controls and processes we have in place are in fact implemented and effective in the opinion of the auditor preparing the report.
Conclusion
The viability of the infrastructure upon which a provider offers its services is core to their ability to meet or exceed your service expectations. So, be sure to look under the hood and really understand the infrastructure behind a provider’s service before making your selection.