IT Connection Newsletter: Issue 4

Virtual data centers offer world-class hosting services at down-to-earth prices, offering the benefits of a fault-tolerant infrastructure, vendor independence, and fast disaster recovery.

What Is Virtual Data Center Hosting? Progent's Virtual Data Center Hosting service combines proven virtualization technology, a state-of-the-art data center, and the support expertise of Progent's Microsoft-certified engineering team to provide small businesses with a comprehensive IT outsourcing alternative that enhances network dependability and security, eliminates management hassle, and saves money.

With Virtual Server Hosting, a small business can have all of its software platforms and critical applications hosted in a secure and fault tolerant data center on a fast, non-stop virtual host configured and maintained by Progent's network support experts.

By using virtualization technology, Progent can optimize the fault tolerance, security, performance, scalability, recoverability, and portability of the customer's environment while keeping hosting expenses low. Progent's clients retain ownership of operating system platforms and all application licenses. Progent owns the physical host servers and is responsible for maintaining them. This means Progent's clients do not have to invest heavily in capital equipment that can quickly become outdated and requires ongoing service.

Virtualization also means that customers can easily and inexpensively move their entire IT environment to another host if and when they believe such a move makes business sense.

A Smart Outsourcing Alternative for Small Businesses
Small businesses typically lack the money or the management time to build and maintain an information network environment that can match the dependability, security, and support quality demanded by large companies. Unfortunately, network downtime, unresolved technical problems, security breaches, poor performance, and low service levels all impair productivity for businesses of any size, and in the case of small companies the relative damage caused by a serious network problem can be far greater than for a larger organization. Mission-critical and line-of-business applications are by definition vital to any organization, but larger enterprises have the economy of scale to build network infrastructures and hire IT support staffs that provide acceptably high degrees of reliability, security, performance, and support. Small companies do not.

Progent's Virtual Data Center Hosting service allows small businesses to get the benefits of enterprise-class IT infrastructure and world-class support services at a cost that is significantly lower than what most small businesses would pay for creating and administering internal data centers and supporting large in-house IT support groups.

How is Virtual Data Center Hosting Different?
With ASP (Application Service Provider) or SaaS (Software as a Service) hosting models, customers own their corporate data but not the operating system platforms or the application licenses for the software that is being maintained by the hosting service. Because it is expensive and time consuming to move from an ASP or SaaS hosting service to another hosting provider or to bring the entire system in house, small businesses with limited IT budgets effectively become captive to their hosting service.

With Progent's Virtual Data Center Hosting model, the customer owns the data, the OS platforms, and the software applications. Because the environment is virtualized, it can be moved immediately to a different hardware environment without lengthy and risky reinstallation and configuration. With Virtual Data Center Hosting, you are not held captive to a single hosting service.

Another benefit that stems from the virtualized architecture behind Progent's Virtual Data Center Hosting service is that data can be recovered quickly in case of a catastrophic event such as a natural disaster. Since the virtual environment is regularly backed up and archived off site, it can be hosted by any physical server acting as the underlying host to the virtual environment.

Progent will also host environments with a mix of operating system platforms and applications and little standardization. This type of environment is common for small businesses but is not addressed by application hosting services and is difficult to support for any hosting service that does not utilize a virtualized architecture or that does not retain a support staff with the depth and breadth of Progent's seasoned engineers.

Find Out More About Progent's Virtual Hosting
For more information about Progent's virtual data center hosting services, call 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

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