Overview Features How it works Why BlueFire
BlueFire UtiliyStorage - Performance Storage - SAN Replacement Service
At BlueFire we understand that data storage, business continuity and data archiving are vital to you. Organisations of all types are under increasing pressure to find cost-effective storage solutions that can cope with not just today's, but tomorrow's data storage requirements.
Performance Storage was a product developed through high demand and requests from our clients. The ability to leverage high performance Storage Area Network - SAN Infrastructure directly interconnected into BlueFire delivered Fibre Fabrics. An alternative to purchasing your own SAN, you can leverage high performance Fibre Channel or FATA disk as a service.
Currently, the UtilityStorage - Performance Storage is avialable at the following datacentres - Optus Ultimo Sydney, Global Switch Sydney, Equinix Sydney, Soul Datacentre Melbourne, IconZ Datacentre Auckland New Zealand.
Pay for the type of storage as you need it, Fibre Channel Disk or FATA Disk on a per cents per GB basis. Growth is on demand and capacity reporting on a quarterly basis. You simply pay for what you use.
Fibre Channel Ports are made avialable to allow clients hosting within the avialable datacentres to allow terminate of servers on to the performance storage.
Storage over Dark Fibre can extend Performance Storage from outside our datacentres. BlueFire can confirm if your location is fibre connected and if performance storage can be deliver to your specific site outside of the datacentre.
Enterprise storage management and reporting, including SLA Portal give you peice of mind that you service is being managed and well supported.
The Storage Dilemma
The factors behind the increased data storage burden are multiple. Business compliance directives mean that legally significant data must now be kept for much longer. New Data Protection regulations and an increase in what data companies must keep on file internally now also accounts for some of the increase. If we were to add email, file storage and other digital records to the mix - it's clear there is significant demand amongst IT Managers for flexible, fully redundant enterprise level storage, at affordable prices.
Outsourcing Your Primary Storage
Traditionally, managing a hosted primary storage network 'in-house' has meant a very significant capital outlay in both hardware and infrastructure terms, not to mention the internal skill sets that need to be paid for. New developments such as Storage-On-Demand are opening up new possibilities. More and more businesses are turning to BlueFire because we have the right partners, and the right experience to deliver high QoS Storage, but with major cost savings.
BlueFire Managed Storage
Drawing on new solutions from industry leaders like HP & Storage Virtualisation leader Datacore, as well as other primary storage suppliers such as EMC & Netapps, our engineers can design and implement solutions based on gigabit Ethernet NAS or SAN, fully meshed and redundant fibre networks, or clustered solutions that allow for storage virtualisation, bit level replication and mirroring – all within the solution, or also across different sites. In short, there's not much we can't handle.
Complete Flexibility
Businesses grow and mature of course and it's likely that your storage needs will also increase. So our primary On-Demand solution features a per gigabyte pricing model, allowing you to only buy what you need, as well as the ability to vary the performance level of your stored data (between high performance, medium and Low/Archive) thus accommodating further cost savings or continually changing capacity requirements.
Choice from the following OnDemand Storage Choices available in any combination.
1. DataCore - Ultra High Speed - Max I/O accelerated, cached read/write access, thin provisioning for databases, transactional applications and multiple SAN redundancy & high availability. Datacore also allows for active replication of this storage to the BlueFire Redundant Datacentre or back to your location. Datacore is a leading storage virtualisation solution that delivers enterprise storage solution. For what VMware is to servers, Datacore is the storage.
2. High Speed Fibre Channel - Single SAN delivered Fibre Channel High Speed Storage - Ultra Fast I/O Storage for databases, mail servers and transactional solutions.
3. iSCSI & Direct Attached Storage - High Speed Storage accessible via the network rather than dedicated fibre network. ISCSI delivers a lower cost of storage for vitualisation, servers and application hostings.
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Performance Storage Options
Choice of Fibre Channel 146GB, 300GB, 450GB (15,000 RPM) Ultra High Speed Drives and slower FATA Drives at 500GB, 1TB, 2TB (7200 RPM) Drives.
5 Datacentre Footprint - Optus Ultimo Sydney, Global Switch Sydney, Equinix Sydney, Soul Melbourne & IconZ Auckland.
Fibre Channel over Dark Fibre is avialable at Fibre Enabled locations for Performance Storage over Dark Fibre.
Multiple replication, archiving and HA options are avialable.
UtilityStorage Virtualisation On Demand.
UtilityStorage provides storage virtualisation solutions that make storage and SAN infrastructures efficient, fault tolerant, flexible and virtual. The solution fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services.
UtilityStorage provide unprecedented purchasing flexibility and future-proofing by empowering customers to fulfill portability and price/performance requirements across a broad choice of systems and devices.
Key Customer Benefits.
- Maximise Resources: Leverage the benefits of virtualisation (cost savings, consolidation, asset optimisation, etc.) in the storage infrastructure.
- Lower Costs: Cost-effective shared storage solution (SAN) for physical and/or virtual environments.
- Higher Availability: Affordable Disaster Recovery (DR) & Business Continuance for customers of all sizes (SMB to Enterprise).
- Ease of Use and IT Simplification: Storage management, consolidation, virtualisation, and data migration tools (SANmotion).
- Better Utilization: Dramatically increases disk utilization to greater than 80% when compared to traditional non-virtualized storage which averages less than 25-40%.
- Enhanced Performance and Productivity: Manage more storage with less effort and fewer resources by leveraging automation.
SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ software converts physical and virtual servers into storage area network (SAN) virtual storage servers, and is the perfect complement to end-to-end server, desktop and application delivery virtualisation. Like VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, DataCore is a portable software solution that survives multiple generations of hardware obsolescence.
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Key Performance Storage Features.
- Hardware Independent and Portable – DataCore Software runs on your choice of physical or virtual hardware: hardware servers, blade servers or VMs. Users can mix and match hardware or VM based storage servers in their deployments.
- Open – Run on Intel/AMD platforms, blades and on all the major Virtual Server platforms – Citrix XenServer™, Sun, Virtual Iron, VMware, Oracle, and Microsoft. DataCore not only runs on these VM environments, DataCore can support all the major storage platforms and the storage can be consolidated and served to MacOS, Netware, Linux, and the many flavours of UNIX and Microsoft – providing optimum storage resource utilisation.
- Feature rich and value-packed – thin provision storage capacity, simplify the migration of data via SANmotion, accelerate storage performance, create high-speed snapshots for fast disk backup and recovery.
- iSCSI and Fibre Channel – networking independence, support for both storage protocols in a single storage server.
- Storage I/O Performance Acceleration – self learning sophisticated caching software
- Auto Grow & Thin Provisioning – presents very large virtual volumes to applications, but only allocates disk blocks dynamically on writes as the application consumes it. Thin provisioning maximizes disk space utilization by serving thin slices of storage from the storage pool as needed and enhances productivity through automation.
- Disk to Disk Snapshots – provides fast point-in-time copies of volumes used in backups, testing and other applications.
- Asynchronous IP Mirroring – adds the ability to replicate storage to remote disaster recovery sites over IP connections.
- Fail-safe Data Protection - Synchronous Network Mirroring (HA) & MPIO supports Auto Fail-over Fail-back for business continuity and fault tolerant data protection.
- “Carry Forward” Value Protection Program – a unique value-add offering for customers to “buy only what they need, when they need it,” that provides the utmost flexibility. Users only pay the difference in cost should they add options, upgrade to higher capacity, or upgrade to larger scale platforms at some future time.
UtilityStorage Virtualisation is the foundation for Total Enterprise Virtualisation.
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Performance Storage Options
Choice of Fibre Channel 146GB, 300GB, 450GB (15,000 RPM) Ultra High Speed Drives and slower FATA Drives at 500GB, 1TB, 2TB (7200 RPM) Drives.
5 Datacentre Footprint - Optus Ultimo Sydney, Global Switch Sydney, Equinix Sydney, Soul Melbourne & IconZ Auckland.
Fibre Channel over Dark Fibre is avialable at Fibre Enabled locations for Performance Storage over Dark Fibre.
Multiple replication, archiving and HA options are avialable.
UtilityStorage Virtualisation On Demand.
UtilityStorage provides storage virtualisation solutions that make storage and SAN infrastructures efficient, fault tolerant, flexible and virtual. The solution fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services.
UtilityStorage provide unprecedented purchasing flexibility and future-proofing by empowering customers to fulfill portability and price/performance requirements across a broad choice of systems and devices.
Key Customer Benefits.
- Maximise Resources: Leverage the benefits of virtualisation (cost savings, consolidation, asset optimisation, etc.) in the storage infrastructure.
- Lower Costs: Cost-effective shared storage solution (SAN) for physical and/or virtual environments.
- Higher Availability: Affordable Disaster Recovery (DR) & Business Continuance for customers of all sizes (SMB to Enterprise).
- Ease of Use and IT Simplification: Storage management, consolidation, virtualisation, and data migration tools (SANmotion).
- Better Utilization: Dramatically increases disk utilization to greater than 80% when compared to traditional non-virtualized storage which averages less than 25-40%.
- Enhanced Performance and Productivity: Manage more storage with less effort and fewer resources by leveraging automation.
SANmelody™ and SANsymphony™ software converts physical and virtual servers into storage area network (SAN) virtual storage servers, and is the perfect complement to end-to-end server, desktop and application delivery virtualisation. Like VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, DataCore is a portable software solution that survives multiple generations of hardware obsolescence.
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Key Performance Storage Features.
- Hardware Independent and Portable – DataCore Software runs on your choice of physical or virtual hardware: hardware servers, blade servers or VMs. Users can mix and match hardware or VM based storage servers in their deployments.
- Open – Run on Intel/AMD platforms, blades and on all the major Virtual Server platforms – Citrix XenServer™, Sun, Virtual Iron, VMware, Oracle, and Microsoft. DataCore not only runs on these VM environments, DataCore can support all the major storage platforms and the storage can be consolidated and served to MacOS, Netware, Linux, and the many flavours of UNIX and Microsoft – providing optimum storage resource utilisation.
- Feature rich and value-packed – thin provision storage capacity, simplify the migration of data via SANmotion, accelerate storage performance, create high-speed snapshots for fast disk backup and recovery.
- iSCSI and Fibre Channel – networking independence, support for both storage protocols in a single storage server.
- Storage I/O Performance Acceleration – self learning sophisticated caching software
- Auto Grow & Thin Provisioning – presents very large virtual volumes to applications, but only allocates disk blocks dynamically on writes as the application consumes it. Thin provisioning maximizes disk space utilization by serving thin slices of storage from the storage pool as needed and enhances productivity through automation.
- Disk to Disk Snapshots – provides fast point-in-time copies of volumes used in backups, testing and other applications.
- Asynchronous IP Mirroring – adds the ability to replicate storage to remote disaster recovery sites over IP connections.
- Fail-safe Data Protection - Synchronous Network Mirroring (HA) & MPIO supports Auto Fail-over Fail-back for business continuity and fault tolerant data protection.
- “Carry Forward” Value Protection Program – a unique value-add offering for customers to “buy only what they need, when they need it,” that provides the utmost flexibility. Users only pay the difference in cost should they add options, upgrade to higher capacity, or upgrade to larger scale platforms at some future time.
UtilityStorage Virtualisation is the foundation for Total Enterprise Virtualisation.
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BlueFire undertakes an analysis of the client storage enviroment and/or gathers information around I/O requirements for te purpose of the use of the storage. Once the profile of the applicaiton and data usage is determined on the disks, BlueFire will suggest a model, RAID Format and type of disks that should be used for the application. This will guarnatee the performance of the storage sub- system underneath the application.
Redundancy considerations are also detemined, eg, RAID 10 can use double the physical disk vs RAID5 uses 20% additional above the raw disk.
BlueFire usage model is designed around the RAW disk usage, high redundancy options within the SAN will use more RAW disk. Appropriate disk redundancy structure is determined as part of this engagement peice.
Spare growth capacity of 20% is provided for growth over the month, capacity true ups occur quarterly.
BlueFire undertakes an analysis of the client storage enviroment and/or gathers information around I/O requirements for te purpose of the use of the storage. Once the profile of the applicaiton and data usage is determined on the disks, BlueFire will suggest a model, RAID Format and type of disks that should be used for the application. This will guarnatee the performance of the storage sub- system underneath the application.
Redundancy considerations are also detemined, eg, RAID 10 can use double the physical disk vs RAID5 uses 20% additional above the raw disk.
BlueFire usage model is designed around the RAW disk usage, high redundancy options within the SAN will use more RAW disk. Appropriate disk redundancy structure is determined as part of this engagement peice.
Spare growth capacity of 20% is provided for growth over the month, capacity true ups occur quarterly.
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Mission
Deliver Enterprise IT Infrastructure as a Service to businesses delivering cost efficiencies, economies of scale, no single points of failure by leveraging best of breed systems with fixed costs with service level guarantees . The ability to leverage a little or alot based on your requirements in order to delivering a better and more cost effective IT environment than what they can do yourselves.
Established
- Market Leader in Managed Services in Asia Pacific Region
- 12 Years established experience
- Stable Profitable Business with 90% of revenues contracted monthly fees.
- Service Level Guarantees with Financial Penalties.
Industry Knowledge
BlueFire is marketing leading in the IT Infrastructure as a Service market place and has 12 years of experience in the delivery of these services.
Certifications
- Microsoft Gold Partner
- Citrix Gold Partner
- Citrix Ready
- VMware VSSP
- Symantec xSP
Experts by any definition.
Highly Trained, Certified Infrastructure engineering experts – experts by any definition.
Ownership - BlueFire is owned by Dimension Data.
Founded in 1983 at the inception of networked communications with a simple vision – to do great things - Dimension Data is a specialist IT services and solutions provider that helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Today we are positioned at the forefront of networking and communications in 47 countries around the world.
By continually building on our knowledge and expertise in IT infrastructure technologies, we have become a recognised global leader in the provision and management of specialist IT infrastructure solutions. We plan, build, support and manage IT infrastructure solutions that help over 6,000 clients achieve their business goals. Drawing on our experience in network integration, security, converged communications, data centres and storage, contact centre and Microsoft technologies, we deliver a full lifecycle of IT services.
Dimension Data at a glance
- Founded in 1983
- 2008 revenues of $4.5 billion
- Listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Securities Exchange Limited
- A client base that spans all industry sectors including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, government and education
- Over 11,055 highly skilled employees
- Established global footprint coupled with unrivalled experience in emerging markets
- Strategic partnerships with leading technology vendors, including Cisco and Microsoft
- Recognised industry leader with 56 industry awards in 2008
www.dimensiondata.com.au
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Delegated Management, Tools & Control Panels.
BlueFire provide delegated management tools to allow our clients to self manage, administrate and have visibility to the functioning performance of their infrastructure service.
Environmentals
- Environmental control units that give a 100% SLA-guaranteed temperature and humidity within a certain range, plus the most advanced pre-action fire-suppression systems available.
- Raised floors and zone-4 certified for earthquakes.
- Dual-feed 12KV power supply from PG&E, plus N+1 redundancy with redundant power feeds.
- UPS modules and PDUs with static switches on front end and emergency redundant back-up diesel generators.
- Fully-redundant, roof-mounted, 1500-ton, Liebert system with common ducting, plus security via the elimination of water-filled piping from the datacenter space.
- CRAC units in the electrical and UPS rooms.
Security
- All premises are closely monitored and guarded, 24x7x365, with sophisticated pan/tilt CCTV covering every part of the facility and security guards posted at all entrances.
- Access to servers is restricted to a limited number of authorized engineers and security is strictly enforced using the very latest technology, including man-trap technology, motion sensors and controlled ID key-cards.
- BlueFire has many customers who demand high security, including financial services clients, hedge funds, pharmaceutical companies, lawyers & accountants.
Data Center and Collocation
BlueFire is a leading IT infrastructure provider delivering highly scalable hosting solutions. Our state-of-the-art data center achieved ISO 27001, reflecting a consistent, reliable and secure operating environment to support customers worldwide.
24x7 physical security with guards, cameras and biometric monitoring keeps.
BlueFire Primary Datacentre – Optus Tier 1 Datacentre is certified under ISO27001 (Information Security Management Systems ISMS, certification for EXPAN™ Co-location services at its Ultimo Data Centre in Sydney).
ISO 27001 is a globally recognised standard governing security of information and network systems. Optus’ accreditation follows a thorough assessment of its hosting services including the identification and implementation of rigorous controls to meet the information security needs of its corporate and government customers.
Connectivity
- National MPLS Network across Australia.
- BlueFire Data centre’s have 8 x Carrier Connections – Optus, Uecomm, Digital River, PIPE Networks, Pacnet, Powertel, AAPT, Soul & Telstra Services.
- Redundant Internet Services provided by Optus, Uecomm & Digital River.
- Dark Fibre connects multiple datacenters & available across Australia.
Infrastructure
- Compliant State of the art data centre.
- Enterprise Class Hewlett Packard Blade Servers.
- Nightly backup & Disaster Recovery Services.
- Proactive monitoring of servers, devices and backup systems.
- State of the art security, content security – anti-virus, spam & patches, intrusion prevention and layer 7 data analysis.
- Redundant high speed Storage Area Networks (SANs)
- Hardware maintenance & Upgrades Included
- Secure access controls to data centre: two factor authentication, biometric scanners.
- 24 x 7 x 365 Network Operation Centre (NOC) – Service Desk.
- Backup power systems and built-in redundancy.
- Minimal Latency and no single point of failure.
- Adheres to Microsoft best practices for infrastructure deployments.
- Active Passive cluster server configuration for ultimate resilience, plus seamless failover when a cluster node is unavailable or taken offline for maintenance.
- Redundant and load-balanced servers increase reliability.
|
Mission
Deliver Enterprise IT Infrastructure as a Service to businesses delivering cost efficiencies, economies of scale, no single points of failure by leveraging best of breed systems with fixed costs with service level guarantees . The ability to leverage a little or alot based on your requirements in order to delivering a better and more cost effective IT environment than what they can do yourselves.
Established
- Market Leader in Managed Services in Asia Pacific Region
- 12 Years established experience
- Stable Profitable Business with 90% of revenues contracted monthly fees.
- Service Level Guarantees with Financial Penalties.
Industry Knowledge
BlueFire is marketing leading in the IT Infrastructure as a Service market place and has 12 years of experience in the delivery of these services.
Certifications
- Microsoft Gold Partner
- Citrix Gold Partner
- Citrix Ready
- VMware VSSP
- Symantec xSP
Experts by any definition.
Highly Trained, Certified Infrastructure engineering experts – experts by any definition.
Ownership - BlueFire is owned by Dimension Data.
Founded in 1983 at the inception of networked communications with a simple vision – to do great things - Dimension Data is a specialist IT services and solutions provider that helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Today we are positioned at the forefront of networking and communications in 47 countries around the world.
By continually building on our knowledge and expertise in IT infrastructure technologies, we have become a recognised global leader in the provision and management of specialist IT infrastructure solutions. We plan, build, support and manage IT infrastructure solutions that help over 6,000 clients achieve their business goals. Drawing on our experience in network integration, security, converged communications, data centres and storage, contact centre and Microsoft technologies, we deliver a full lifecycle of IT services.
Dimension Data at a glance
- Founded in 1983
- 2008 revenues of $4.5 billion
- Listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Securities Exchange Limited
- A client base that spans all industry sectors including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, government and education
- Over 11,055 highly skilled employees
- Established global footprint coupled with unrivalled experience in emerging markets
- Strategic partnerships with leading technology vendors, including Cisco and Microsoft
- Recognised industry leader with 56 industry awards in 2008
www.dimensiondata.com.au
|
Delegated Management, Tools & Control Panels.
BlueFire provide delegated management tools to allow our clients to self manage, administrate and have visibility to the functioning performance of their infrastructure service.
Environmentals
- Environmental control units that give a 100% SLA-guaranteed temperature and humidity within a certain range, plus the most advanced pre-action fire-suppression systems available.
- Raised floors and zone-4 certified for earthquakes.
- Dual-feed 12KV power supply from PG&E, plus N+1 redundancy with redundant power feeds.
- UPS modules and PDUs with static switches on front end and emergency redundant back-up diesel generators.
- Fully-redundant, roof-mounted, 1500-ton, Liebert system with common ducting, plus security via the elimination of water-filled piping from the datacenter space.
- CRAC units in the electrical and UPS rooms.
Security
- All premises are closely monitored and guarded, 24x7x365, with sophisticated pan/tilt CCTV covering every part of the facility and security guards posted at all entrances.
- Access to servers is restricted to a limited number of authorized engineers and security is strictly enforced using the very latest technology, including man-trap technology, motion sensors and controlled ID key-cards.
- BlueFire has many customers who demand high security, including financial services clients, hedge funds, pharmaceutical companies, lawyers & accountants.
Data Center and Collocation
BlueFire is a leading IT infrastructure provider delivering highly scalable hosting solutions. Our state-of-the-art data center achieved ISO 27001, reflecting a consistent, reliable and secure operating environment to support customers worldwide.
24x7 physical security with guards, cameras and biometric monitoring keeps.
BlueFire Primary Datacentre – Optus Tier 1 Datacentre is certified under ISO27001 (Information Security Management Systems ISMS, certification for EXPAN™ Co-location services at its Ultimo Data Centre in Sydney).
ISO 27001 is a globally recognised standard governing security of information and network systems. Optus’ accreditation follows a thorough assessment of its hosting services including the identification and implementation of rigorous controls to meet the information security needs of its corporate and government customers.
Connectivity
- National MPLS Network across Australia.
- BlueFire Data centre’s have 8 x Carrier Connections – Optus, Uecomm, Digital River, PIPE Networks, Pacnet, Powertel, AAPT, Soul & Telstra Services.
- Redundant Internet Services provided by Optus, Uecomm & Digital River.
- Dark Fibre connects multiple datacenters & available across Australia.
Infrastructure
- Compliant State of the art data centre.
- Enterprise Class Hewlett Packard Blade Servers.
- Nightly backup & Disaster Recovery Services.
- Proactive monitoring of servers, devices and backup systems.
- State of the art security, content security – anti-virus, spam & patches, intrusion prevention and layer 7 data analysis.
- Redundant high speed Storage Area Networks (SANs)
- Hardware maintenance & Upgrades Included
- Secure access controls to data centre: two factor authentication, biometric scanners.
- 24 x 7 x 365 Network Operation Centre (NOC) – Service Desk.
- Backup power systems and built-in redundancy.
- Minimal Latency and no single point of failure.
- Adheres to Microsoft best practices for infrastructure deployments.
- Active Passive cluster server configuration for ultimate resilience, plus seamless failover when a cluster node is unavailable or taken offline for maintenance.
- Redundant and load-balanced servers increase reliability.
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CEO - Owner
Enterprise IT Infrastructure priced for SMBs
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IT Manager
Deliver better solution for our client with no compromise on technology.
LEARN MORE...
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User - Staff
Reliability – Access to your systems from wherever your staff is just so they can work when they need to.
LEARN MORE...
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CEO - Owner
Enterprise IT Infrastructure priced for SMBs
LEARN MORE... |
|
IT Manager
Deliver better solution for our client with no compromise on technology.
LEARN MORE...
|
|
User - Staff
Reliability – Access to your systems from wherever your staff is just so they can work when they need to.
LEARN MORE...
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