C24 has built a product portfolio that includes the ability for you as an organisation, to outsource the management of your IT Infrastructure. A number of our clients prefer to have their own equipment hosted with our tier 4 data centre and outsource a number of IT functions to us, which may include patching, network monitoring and management.

This type of solution allows you to have higher service levels for a similar price to what is managed in house and due to the significant investment in our hosting and communications infrastructure you can benefit from significant higher uptime with improved business productivity. Other benefits include the benefit of a scalable model, access to multiple hosting sites for data replication and disaster recovery, systems that are the equivalent to many larger organisations and full system monitoring.

This solution is ideal for businesses within all verticals, companies with a strong online presence, multi-site organisations that are looking to run a reduced IT footprint at smaller locations and organisations who are currently running their own data centres whether onsite or within another data centre.

Business Benefits of Infrastructure Hosting

• Operational benefits such as internal skills issues,
  improving applications and bandwidth scalability
• Technical benefits such as latest platforms, support and 24/7/365 monitoring
• Cost benefits with the reduction in operational expenses moving from capex to opex

Our infrastructure management solution of choice is Systems Centre Operations Management and our operation is primarily based around the Microsoft Software Solutions Stack. The reasons for this are not just based around price but functionality and solutions.

Microsoft offers its virtualisation and management solutions at lower cost and higher value for customers. Microsoft's server solution costs approximately one-sixth the cost of a comparable solution from VMware*.

Prices shown in dollars.

Microsoft offers more features for your money than VMware

Microsoft provides many capabilities that VMware does not and cannot offer.

This chart compares VMware Enterprise core features with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center Management core features. As you can see, Microsoft is ahead in many of the areas required for a robust desktop to datacentre virtualization and management solution.

For customers who need a hypervisor, the free Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 has all the features you need.

You get live migration and clustering for free with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. These features are available at no additional charge and provide the following benefits for customers:

• Support for live migration for "zero downtime" planned migrations
• Support for host clustering for unplanned downtime protection
• Lower total cost of ownership compared to VMware ESX 3i
• Improved scalability with support for 1 TB host memory and up to 8 sockets

If you would like further information about C24’s hosting capability and the Microsoft solutions stack that we deploy please do not hesitate to call us on 0121 550 4569.