Managed Storage

Benefits

• Get peace of mind: improve data availability and recovery to meet business and regulatory requirements
• Manage costs: get the right balance of cost and performance by mixing and matching storage options
• Respond rapidly to change: easily scale storage capacity as your needs increase, without capital investment, capacity planning or hardware refresh
• Refocus internal resources: release in-house teams from routine tasks by out-tasking storage management

Key features

• A range of disk technologies, providing a choice of performance levels
• Built-in security features, preventing unauthorised access to your data
• Pre-defined or customised disk configurations that meet your specific requirements
• Comprehensive reporting that keeps you up to date with current and forecast usage
• Colt’s low-latency network that ensures rapid, reliable access to your data

Colt’s Managed Storage Service provides you with shared or dedicated primary storage capacity. A choice of disk technologies – Flash Drive, Fibre Channel (FC) disk and SATA –offers a range of performance levels to meet varying requirements, from complex financial modelling and heavily used database log files to low-usage intranet repositories and archives.

The service helps improve data availability and recovery, and can be easily extended in line with your growing storage needs; you don’t have to worry about capacity planning, infrastructure management or hardware refreshes.

A secure web portal lets you view a range of reports about your Managed Storage Service, including current status and forecast usage.

Delivered in partnership

We deliver the Managed Storage Service from our secure data centres over our low-latency network in partnership with storage specialists EMC. The combination of their storage expertise with our core expertise in networking, infrastructure and security management creates the most  secure, resilient and accessible managed storage service for you.

The Managed Storage Service can be used with Windows, Linux and UNIX operating systems; and with VMware and MS Hyper V server virtualisation environments. It offers three storage options that you can mix and match to get the right balance of cost and performance for your applications:

• Shared storage delivered from shared disks in a multi-tenant storage array, with a choice of pre-defined disk configurations
• Shared storage delivered from dedicated disks in a multi-tenant storage array, with a choice of pre-defined disk configurations and the possibility of disks configured to your special requirements
• Dedicated storage delivered from a dedicated storage array, configured to meet your requirements.

Dedicated storage
 
Dedicated storage is especially suitable if you need to comply with regulatory requirements to store specific types of data on dedicated disks. It also offers extra capabilities such as point-in-time copy and a replication option for remote mirroring.

Connectivity

Connectivity to your storage array is provided via a Fibre Channel (FC) storage area network (SAN) or using secure network attached storage (NAS).

Service implementation

We install and configure the storage disks in one of our data centres and provide connectivity up to a defined demarcation point. Security features built into the service design prevent third-party access to your data.

Service management and support

We monitor your managed storage service 24x7. We also take responsibility for incident management, problem management, configuration management and capacity management. We work within an ITIL framework to ensure consistent processes and industry best practice.