03 Dec Making your transition easier and more cost-effective
By Anthony Carrick
A couple of exciting developments within the IT and telecommunications sector are enabling us at CT4 to expand our private cloud services in Australia. These developments are NextDC’s addition of Brisbane B2 – a new state-of-the-art data centre in Brisbane; and the introduction of Megaport for flexible and elastic networking.
NextDC B2 Datacentre
CT4 are the very first customers to take up “residency” in B2 located in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. We are also a B2 foundation partner of NextDC. B2 is located close to a major electricity substation and telecommunications infrastructure. Such proximity to critical infrastructure will help to ensure reliability and connectivity for all customers. Such reliability and connectivity will allow us to expand our private cloud service to many more business in Australia with this soon-to-be increased capacity and connectivity.
NextDC are excited to have CT4 as an ‘early-access’ customer in their new B2 datacentre. We at CT4 appreciate NextDC’s responsiveness, service, and communications. NextDC has written about our entry to B2 on their news page: Early bird CT4 catches the worm at NEXTDC B2
Megaport Connectivity for Flexible Networking
CT4 is expanding our use of Megaport for our inter-region and inter-datacentre connectivity. Megaport is a telecommunications company offering fibre-optic infrastructure between datacentres (with the expertise to maintain it!). Because they own and maintain the infrastructure and required interconnect points, Megaport can offer elastic and flexible networking between any of the end-points they service. This allows them to provide a unique product – scalable and elastic networking around the globe, between supported datacentres, borrowing the concept from the public cloud’s elastic storage or compute resources.
Figure 1Image from www.megaport.com
Via a simple web portal that Megaport offers, we can easily scale up the bandwidth for a client to high levels for a short time as part of data replication; or even remove a link once the replication has taken place, opening up the new location for BAU use at normal bandwidth when it’s ready. This can save you large bandwidth costs by only paying for what you need, and the web portal helps us manage your networking much more cost-effectively and pass those savings on to you!
The Possibilities!
Using CT4’s private cloud based virtual desktop technology, a company with multiple sites around the country could increase their bandwidth to say 1Gb/s between sites during a 6 week project and then reduce it back down to 100Mb/s after the project’s completion. The unique advantage of Megaport over traditional carrier links between datacentres is that the Megaport is billed per minute. This means that you can literally turn down the connection over the weekend for only light file transfer between corporate sites, and ramp it back up when the users need to work with large files during the week.
Within the retail industry, the flexibility of Megaport provided networking allows the business to optimise their networking costs over the year. Imagine your retail stores all connect to central databases in the capital cities, and each capital city site connects via Megaport managed by CT4. During the Christmas period when the retailer is handling a higher volume of traffic, CT4 could simply increase their bandwidth to accommodate this new, but temporary, higher load.
Without the flexible networking technologies provided by Megaport, companies would have previously been stuck with two less-than-ideal options:
- Have to pay for high bandwidth for a fixed contract term, essentially overspending most of the time or
- Going with connection that’s too small and struggling with the speed between sites, but paying a more reasonable amount.
Using Megaport connectivity in datacentres, CT4 can give you both affordable costs and sufficient bandwidth in peak periods, seamlessly integrated with yours and our existing networking infrastructure in the datacentre.
CT4
On the datacentres where Megaport don’t have (yet) connectivity, we can arrange a private connection to a nearby datacentre which does, giving us and our clients the benefits of scalable networking without increasing costs with datacentres providers.
CT4’s extensive experience with offsite and cloud-based business functions and “private cloud” virtual desktop technologies combined our networking and platform experience help us provide the best possible upgrade path for your business. Contact us today to speak to us about moving to the cloud or offsite. If you have an existing relationship with us, drop us a line – let’s chat business and IT, see if we can make things better!