New ‘vPlatform’ from Star targets UK businesses who want to move their virtualised computers into a managed data centre to guarantee service quality
LONDON, 19th October, 2009 – Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services for UK businesses, has announced the launch of a secure and fully managed virtualisation platform. The new service is delivered via a hosted infrastructure, called vPlatform, and helps businesses to deploy, configure and decommission multiple virtual machines on-demand, to suit their changing business requirements. The vPlatform service is designed for businesses that have already deployed virtual machines in-house and are looking for a more cost-effective and flexible means of managing their computing assets, or for those businesses that are considering virtualisation for the first time.
vPlatform services are delivered from a highly resilient infrastructure and incorporate the latest virtualisation technology to provide a level of security that would be prohibitively expensive to replicate in-house. For a low fixed monthly fee, Star’s new virtualisation service allows up to 20 virtual servers to be hosted, starting from £90 per server per month.
In keeping with Star’s philosophy of bringing the best in industry technologies to UK businesses, vPlatform is based on a dedicated VMware ESX cluster and is monitored and managed by Star’s own team of technology specialists. In this way, Star provides strong service level agreements to guarantee that the service is continually running at optimum efficiency so that customers can remove the costs and risk associated with managing and maintaining complex computer systems on their own premises. Star also ensures the power consumption of all computer hardware is maximised to pass on further cost savings to customers.
vPlatform gives customers the ability to quickly scale up or down the number of virtual servers required. It takes customers less than two minutes to configure and provision a new virtual machine using vPlatform, compared with conventional server deployment, which can take weeks. With administrative control delivered via a dedicated portal, customers can allocate additional resources, such as; RAM, processors or storage, to any virtual machine instantaneously. What this really means to customers is that they have ready access to a huge pool of computing power and resilient storage. The vPlatform service also includes secure, off-site backups of all data stored on the platform.
Andy Jefferies, from IT Consultancy ntegra, has decided to provide Star’s vPlatform service to customers and is clear on the benefits: “We always strive to deliver leading solutions to our clients and are happy to offer this new virtual service from Star as it is more cost effective than traditional hosting platforms. The commercial benefits coupled with the resilience of the platform means that vPlatform is a clear win for ntegra customers. We manage the operating systems and applications on behalf of our clients, so they can be confident that the hardware and infrastructure is in safe hands.”
James Griffin, Head of Hosting Strategy at Star states, “The growth in adoption of virtualisation in UK businesses has been strong, with many companies now utilising virtualisation platforms for business-critical applications. Along with the many benefits of virtualisation, managing a critical business infrastructure in this way also brings with it specific challenges. The introduction of vPlatform underlines Star’s commitment to delivering managed hosting solutions that support business agility by removing the ever growing complexity of managing and optimising virtualised infrastructure platforms. As the underlying technology continues to mature, there will be continued growth in the volume of applications that businesses run on a virtualised infrastructure, where IT departments seek to deliver better value and service to their internal and external stakeholders. “