Virtualised Servers OnDemand

OnDemand Virtual Servers

BlueFire On Demand Servers is a self-service Capacity on Demand platform built by BlueFire to enable our clients to provision servers as required instantly from the BlueFire OnDemand Server Portal.

You can provision template based server builds at any of the BlueFire 3 Datacentres OnDemand.

Dynamically deploy new servers and virtual appliances

You can pre-configure your inventory of virtual infrastructure and pay for what you need when you need it. Set pricing is provided on the portal to purchase server resources.

Clients then use the engine to deploy new servers and virtual appliances on demand and pay for what they use.

Scalability control of RAM, CPU and Storage

BlueFire gives end-users control to manage their infrastructure on demand. It allows them to scale up and down the CPU, RAM and Storage of each virtual machine via their BlueFire control panel. Prices of each component are set allowing you to simply consume what you need. Scalability control can be applied to each virtual machine at any time.

Reboot, Turn on and Off

BlueFire allows end-users to reboot, turn on and off servers at anytime using the web dashboard.

Integrated billing platform

BlueFire has an integrated billing for charging the deployment of new servers and virtual appliances. The billing system also extends to scalability of adding CPU, RAM and storage. You simply pay for your consumption on demand.

Integrated Support platform

BlueFire has a full integrated support module that allows customers to log support requests directly to your staff via the web dashboard.

Reporting

A reporting suite for customers is included to measure utilisation reports for server capacity for CPU, RAM and storage of your running virtual machines. This allows you to manage workload and upgrade/downgrade server resources as you need.

Benefits to Enterprises

CIO can assign a cost to the Virtual Infrastructure, controlling allocations to departments, office locations, and teams.

CIO can assign budgets and has financial control over virtual infrastructure

CIO can maximize infrastructure resources and ROI

Flexibility in assigning budgets, unit costs of CPU, RAM and Storage, and allocation of virtual infrastructure to each department.

Reduces Virtual Server Sprawl

Ensure greater accountability of Virtual infrastructure use

You have an IT environment growing at hyper speed or expanding and contracting nonstop.

Scaling to meet your computing capacity needs is a given. Scaling your hardware costs that quickly or that often is not a given. Fortunately, our Dedicated Virtual Servers make cost-efficient scaling a practical reality. It's a smart approach to hosting—one that constantly helps you better manage your hardware resources. With Virtual Dedicated Servers, you get the most out of your servers and you only pay for the resources you're using at any given time.

BlueFire makes sure the solution works for you around the clock. The physical servers, the virtualization layer and the virtual machines are all managed 24x7x365 by our Certified VMware experts.

So, you scale with your business and control your budget. All with a solution that delivers the support and expertise your business needs. In short, you accomplished what you set out to do—you got your money's worth without making sacrifices.

Rapid VM Provisioning Makes Scaling Easier & On-demand Computing Capacity Possible so you can meet your performance and capacity needs at a moment's notice (with pre-defined Virtual Machines)

The Security of Dedicated Virtual Servers provides greater peace of mind if you're concerned about the compromises, unanticipated traffic spikes and security breaches that have plagued some shared virtualization providers

Automatic Recovery Keeps You Up and Running, delivering redundancy by recovering data from a second host machine (multiple servers and SAN required)

Snapshots Provide Increased Data Protection during your OS and application upgrades

Use What You Pay For and Maximize Your Hardware Investment by better utilizing your servers through Virtual Machines

Pay for What You Use with Utility Billing that only charges for your Virtual Machines when they are turned on

Quickly Get To a Stable and Secure Virtualized Environment without investing your own time and resources to do it all yourself

The BlueFire Virtualization Team, Staffed with Certified VMware Specialists, manages your physical server, virtualization layer and virtual machines so you can make the most of your solution

BlueFire 24/7 365 Day Support Working to Support You and your environment around the clock.

Maximum Uptime with inbuilt high availability & SLA.

Secondary Datacentre Delivery of Disaster Recovery Services available on Demand.

Leverage the BlueFire Infrastructure to deploy your server environment.

Reduce IT Costs While Improving Flexibility & Responsiveness

Reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50%
Reduce energy costs by 80%
Reduce the time it takes to provision new servers by up to 70%
Add high availability and redundancy into your server design.
Save more than $3,000 per year for every server workload virtualized.
Reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better

Consolidate Excess Hardware & Increase Server Utilization

Our Professional Services team can help you assess your IT environment to identify consolidation candidates and to calculate the potential savings from using virtualization.

BlueFire provides your own delegated control panel to Manage Your Virtual Infrastructure from a Single Point of Control

Accelerate provisioning time.
Manage virtual machines from a central location
Monitor the performance of virtual machines and their hosts

Automate your Virtual Infrastructure to Ensure Peak Performance

With VMware, your IT organization can deliver levels of performance, scalability and availability that are not possible with a physical infrastructure. Using VMware vCenter Server in combination with our VMware VMotion and VMware DRS products, your organization will be able to:

Avoid planned downtime with live migration of virtual machines
Enable dynamic policy-based allocation of IT resources with automated load balancing
Eliminate many repetitive configuration and maintenance tasks

Work with BlueFire to help your organization leverage these unique capabilities as part of an ongoing strategy

Benefits of VMware virtual infrastructure for you business or organisation:

Pool resources to better share and utilise available servers and storage
Increase availability, automation and flexibility using building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers
Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualized
Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime
60-80% utilization rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualized PCs)

BlueFire OnDemand Virtual Server Services works in the following way.

The Server on Demand interface integrates into the BlueFire Virtual Server Farm at all 3 BlueFire Datacentres across Australia.

It Creates a web based interface to allow customer access into the system. Customers are presented with 'selected' virtual machines. These machines can be pre-configured template based VMDK VMware Images that can be drawn from the BlueFire Server Library. Customers can pre-configure and place these setup images in the library to be used by the system at the appropriate time.

BlueFire provides Costs which are assigned to each virtual machine; unit cost of CPU, RAM & Storage. This allows our clients to select the exact resource sizing required to do the job at hand.

Customers can deploy virtual machines as required, scale the capacity of CPU, RAM and Storage and pay for they use.

Customers are provided end to end Self-service control. Customers can decommission servers, reboot servers, and turn them on & off. Advanced reporting on the Utilisation reports are also available from the portal to allow you to assess how hard your servers are working and to determine the correct sizing. Only use the resources you need.

The system provides an integrated billing system that allows customers to be charged as a utility based on capacity and time. Unit prices, terms of service, SLA and QoS are all specified.

Virtual appliances are available from the library allow you to package software and Operating System configurations into virtual machines, providing them via the BlueFire On Demand Server service.

Leverage the infinite scalability of Servers as an OnDemand Utility that can be brought online when you need them from any of the BlueFire datacentres.

What is Virtualisation?

Virtualisation is a technology which utilises a piece of hardware to emulate or "virtualise" hardware and create virtual machines with their own CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller. This allows you to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time and hence increases the flexibility and functionality of your hardware and therefore your business throughput.

The VMware approach to virtualisation inserts a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This software layer creates virtual machines and contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor” that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer without even knowing it.

However, virtualising a single physical computer is just the beginning. VMware offers a robust virtualisation platform that can scale across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices to form an entire virtual infrastructure.

VMware virtual infrastructure software is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. Contact BlueFire to find out how VMware software can help consolidate servers, optimize software development and provide affordable business continuity.

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.