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It’s go for ‘Pay-as-you-grow’

 

Manchester’s growing businesses are being given a foot on the data centre ladder following an innovative promotion from one of the city’s newest tech firms.

Datacentreplus provides colocation for businesses’ IT equipment at its Media City premises, working with organisations who want to outsource their power, storage and cooling requirements for their servers and data backup.

Founded in 2014 with the intention of offering tech start-ups and SMEs an easier route to using data centre facilities, the company has now launched ‘Pay as you Grow’.

Much like the business’s own reasons for establishment – those arising from the lack of agility among the industry’s larger players to provide a service appropriate to the needs of a growing business – ‘Pay as you Grow’ was conceived after witnessing other providers’ inability to provide any flexible growth models.

Mashukul Hoque, entrepreneur and founder of Datacentreplus, is passionate about changing the rigid dynamics that are prevalent in the data centre space, and ‘Pay as you Grow’ is very much in line with his ethos of providing flexibility to help businesses grow.

He said: “As more and more, increasingly small to medium-sized, businesses begin their journey into the cloud, it is only right that the data centre community facilitates this progression and provides an environment that supports growth and is sympathetic to cash flow.

“Barriers of trust and price are beginning to be overcome at a rate of knots, however, agility still remains an issue. ‘Pay as you Grow’ essentially provides a client with the ability to grow their services, allowing them to reserve dedicated space, and only pay for it when they grow into it.”

The ‘Pay as you Grow’ concept was originally trialled with a ‘quarter rack’ customer who only paid for what they needed at the time. That customer now has multiple racks with the company, expanding into their ‘reserved’ space. And although trialled with an end user customer, the service is now proving popular among a growing number of channel partners who are looking to acquire flexible rack space that increases in line with the services they procure, allowing them to protect growth margins.

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Are You Based In-House?

An in-house IT infrastructure or even data centre can seem like the best option. It’s already in place. You have your IT department, everything is just fine. To move would be an expense, perhaps a nuisance, business is running as usual.

But what happens should here be a power failure or something even worse, things get old!?

It takes a bit of planning, maybe even a bit of consolidation, cutting out the old and superfluous, updating the whole idea of your infrastructure. However, the advantages of moving to a data centre far outweigh the risks of keeping your network and storage in-house. Firstly, like I just mentioned, it’s an excuse for a spring clean, to really identify your infrastructure requirements, everything can always be improved upon especially when it starts to get a little dusty. In fact we were recently offering IT health checks at an expo, when was the last time that you did?

Failovers

Power, network, bandwidth and cooling, all of these attributes are connected to high outgoings. They are an expense that really, your office isn’t kitted out for. Equipment takes up a lot of space and should there be a failure, everything will more than likely grind to a halt. In a data centre your servers are in the optimum environment. In fact, finding a data centre that was purpose built means that everything is in place to keep the building cool, and to failovers on power and connectivity with ease should it be required.

Hardware

As your servers get older, a hard drive or a processor fails, they takes time and money to replace, hardware can be a massive investment. Actually, if you were to rent a dedicated server from us for example, all hardware replacements are under our remit, they don’t cost you a penny. The whole environment is our responsibility, you just pay one fixed price a month.

Backups

If the worst does happen, do you have backups in place? A data centre can often offer affordable back-ups, with room to grow. Rather than having to spend the time estimating the amount of storage required and purchasing the kit, data centres have the whole thing set-up and ready to go, accessible via the cloud, we certainly do.

Speed

Being a data centre, we have in place multiple super fast connections. Do you find that you have latency with your in-house networks? Well, we can supply a variation of speeds fit for your need. If you really want it super fast, look no further than ethernet.

Staff

Your IT team have to be well-trained in a variation of skills to be able to look after the infrastructure correctly. Data centre engineers do this day in day out. They have generally seen all of the issues that arise and have dealt with them in exceedingly fast and timely manners. Also, data centres have SLAs (service level agreements) which means that should something not go according to agreement, they are held accountable. This is important as we realise that your business relies on its infrastructure. Our business is the internet and keeping your connected to it. Freeing up your staff to keep their attention on any other day to day responsibilities, unforeseen issues always pop up and it is best to keep your staff focussed on what they do best, it’s all about productivity. Data centres are also operational 24 hours a day, all year round.

What really matters is the knowledge and the environment. Reduce risk, downtime and energy consumption, increase security, efficiency and productivity.

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The ‘cloud’; it’s a buzzword.

We’re not talking about actual clouds. There aren’t any magical buzzing radio signals whizzing over your heads carrying packets of information from your computer to a server farm in Switzerland. But I’m guessing you already know this, that’s why you’re here listening to us.

It seems completely incomprehensible but in fact lies within reliable physical infrastructure.

The ‘cloud’ gets a little overused sometimes and suggests an omnipresence for no cost. In fact the actual meaning is simply the convenience of accessing your files from anywhere in the world. Not to save your files on your local physical hard drive but instead to save them remotely to a server accessed via the internet.

The actual term ‘cloud computing’, popularised in the late 1990’s and made common during the 2000’s, actually evolved from the idea of pooling computer resources; CPU, RAM and storage, allowing for redundancy, resiliency, scalability and optimisation. This creates a virtual network. This network is accessed, as mentioned, via the internet.

Something as simple as checking your email classes as accessing the cloud. If you use Google Docs, Dropbox or the like, then you are saving and editing content on the cloud. Netflix, for example, hosts its vast selection of films and series on the largest pure-cloud around. It has a highly available, scalable, resilient, load-balanced infrastructure with their own CDN offering region to region availability, allowing viewers to access the portal and stream online.

If you wish to create your own private cloud whatever the size, we can facilitate that. A few U or a few racks, use them and create your own infrastructure with your own hardware in the optimum environment. On the other hand, if you want us to manage things for you then you can talk through your businesses needs and our qualified engineers can architect the solution for you. The true cloud – we supply remote access as standard on our dual feed network.

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Datacentreplus - Dedicated Servers & Manchester Colocation

A brand new data centre has been launched in the heart of Manchester which hopes to be an incubator for new and growing tech companies. Constructed by local tech business Sandyx, the site was built and fully operational in an unprecedented four months.

Created in an unused warehouse unit, the 4,000 square foot site will provide flexible, commitment free monthly contracts. With the population of SMEs in the area steadily growing and Manchester becoming a major hub in the UK’s high-tech boom, the importance of data centre space for growing companies has never been more important. This, coupled with the growth of the already established £650 million MediaCityUK development, Data Centre Plus sees this as a great time to be getting into the market.

Officially launched in January 2015, the data centre has already received high levels of interest from a variety of new and exciting clients.

The concept for the build was the brainchild of Managing Director and owner of Sandyx, Mashukul Hoque, following years of running a successful software business which is heavily reliant on data centre services.

“As MD of a tech business in Manchester I was frustrated by the difficulties in accessing data centre space at a reasonable price. As I didn’t have a large footprint or a wholesale requirement I felt that I was being treated as if my business was small potatoes to them. So we decided to build our own data centre to work with local SMEs as well as technology and media companies. We feel we are better placed to serve business and we aim to provide the best customer service and flexibility in the region” – Mashukul Hoque

Data Centre Plus will provide Hosting and Server co-location as well as connectivity services. The aim is to provide commitment-free, flexible contracts which aren’t usually easily accessible at an unbeatable price.

The data centre will create 25 new jobs over the next 12 months.

To drive the business forward, the company has appointed Gareth Riley. Gareth is an established senior sales professional with over 16 years’ experience in the IT and Telecoms space with companies such as Zen Internet and Exponential-e.

Gareth Says: “I’m relishing the challenge of starting something from the ground up and doing things differently to the rest of our competition. We place the customer at the forefront of all we do and offer a transparent service with no hidden charges. Our offering will provide enterprise grade service at manageable price points and offer flexibility. This is unique in the data centre space. We can do this because we own our DC and therefore don’t have investors to answer to on decisions we make”

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