Latest | FIBERTOWN BLOG

5 Top Reasons to Use On-Site Service from Data Centers

At FIBERTOWN, we offer our colocation clients an on-site service we call our “hands and eyes” support.

Clients often utilize this service during natural disasters, like Hurricane Harvey and Winter Storm Uri, but we also offered significant support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the top 5 reasons our customers continue to ask for on-site service from our 24/7 tech staff.

Reason #1: Better use of time and budgeting

If your business is located in Texas, you may have come on-site to one of our data centers to set up your IT equipment or move it from your previous environment.

But when you have something like a hardware reboot — the simple turning off and on of hardware to reset the equipment and get it back online — is it really your best use of time to drive or fly to our data center to do it yourself?

The best business acumen will say budgeting for that short trip doesn’t make fiscal sense. It’s better to utilize the expert on-site FIBERTOWN staff to handle the in-person fixes.

You can also ship your hard drives or devices to FIBERTOWN data centers, and we can install them for you. Save your tech the trip.

Reason #2: We take care of the repetitive tasks

In an IT environment, small changes that need to happen for hardware aren’t always difficult — but they are necessary.

For example, tasks like labeling or racking devices — placing devices into cabinets, plugging in power and connective cords are important. They must be done correctly and accurately, but not necessarily by your own personal techs.

These are great tasks to hand off to our hands and eyes team.

Reason #3: Cheaper than sending IT staff to fix

Troubleshooting is always going to be part of the IT daily tasks.

Whether it’s a new configuration or devices, testing and fixing are just part of the business process.

If you need someone to console or plug into devices, discover what errors the device is showing, and work with your team on fixes — we have the skilled staff to handle it.

Instead of sending your own team, or hiring a third party, you can rely on the 24/7/365 staff that knows the ins and outs of our data center environment and can get you back on track quickly.

It’s a simple way to save money on your bottom line.

Reason #4: Convenience

When you’re in the middle of the workday, canceling meetings and interrupting the flow of your day to make your way to your data center is a hassle.

Convenience is key.

You can rely on the FIBERTOWN staff to help you with those on-site swaps that need to happen for your IT department.

We can help swap bad memory or hard drives to avoid excessive downtime.

Or, we’re able to reterminate or relocate cabling. Direct our staff to swap out bad cables or move cables to different ports or different devices, and we’ll get it done for you quickly.

Reason #5: Gives your staff time to focus on higher-level tasks

Being able to see the long-term vision for your IT staff is vitally important.

Every team has concurrent projects that have solid deadlines.

Giving your staff the time they need to focus on those higher-level tasks keeps projects on time and staff on point.

For customers who have a lot of data storage needs, we can handle tape rotations, store tapes on-site, or pack up tapes to ship to off-site storage.

Prepared for the upcoming hurricane season

At FIBERTOWN, we help companies address two key factors: maintaining the availability of your critical technical systems and work area recovery space.

Customers look to FIBERTOWN and our team of disaster recovery experts to maintain 100% up-time.

Our hands and eyes service is just one way we continue to help our clients when they need it most.

Call us today, and gain peace of mind knowing you can handle any disaster that comes your way.

FIBERTOWN’s Blended Bandwidth

A critical element for any business is network connectivity. In fact, a past Gartner study found that it costs businesses on average $5,600 per minute of downtime. Of course, this is an average, and the exact number fluctuates by industry and size of the business. Even with those considerations, the message is clear – lost connectivity is expensive! By using blended bandwidth inside our data centers, we ensure you have multiple sources of internet at all times, giving you peace of mind and cost-effective internet.

How Our Blended Bandwidth Works

At FIBERTOWN, we peer with the best internet service providers (ISPs) in the Houston and Bryan, Texas areas. By combining these ISPs in a single contract, we’re able to offer our data center and colocation customers reliable, fast connectivity.

Our blended bandwidth always comes from at least 3 providers, guaranteeing redundancy. If one service provider goes down, others are available as an immediate path for your data.

And our Forward-Looking Glass always allows your information to find and use the fastest path.

As an example of speed, our redundant, path-diverse points to point between our Bryan and Houston data centers average 2.3 milliseconds. (That’s fast!)

Benefits of FIBERTOWN’s Blended Bandwidth

Besides speed, there are other benefits to this service for our customers.

Resiliency. Unlike most carriers who build only one entrance for internet into their facilities, FIBERTOWN’s data centers have at least 2 fiber entries. And that means increasing resiliency. For example, if a utility crew accidentally cuts the fiber on one end of our building, you still have an internet connection because the other fiber entrance is not affected.

100% uptime. Due to the multiple carriers and multiple fiber entrances, we maintain 100% uptime SLA. The reality is that ISPs go down often and for a host of reasons – maintenance, card failures, weather, road construction, power outages, or a random guy with a shovel or backhoe cuts fiber.

By FIBERTOWN using multiple ISPs, you don’t go down when one ISP goes down. The very nature of our blended bandwidth keeps you connected.

Circuit installation speed. Most ISPs take 30 days or more to get a connection to a customer. They must configure it, plan capacity, and physically run the cable. With FIBERTOWN, though, we can have you connected in 2 weeks or less. (Sometimes, we can even do it the same day!)

Temporary bandwidth. Due to our connectivity infrastructure already being in place, we also can offer temporary bandwidth. We can configure and install up to a 10Gbps circuit quickly, even if you need it for only a few months.

Secondary or backup circuit. The reality is – If you’re a data center customer, you’re already preparing for the worst. You refuse to let power failures, winter storms, or hurricanes catch you unprepared! That’s why we encourage data center customers to consider FIBERTOWN’s blended bandwidth for its primary or secondary circuit. It’s the best way to plan for the worst.

But, We Don’t Only Offer Blended Bandwidth…

We strive to be a one-stop solution for our customers. Because we have strong, long-standing relationships with other technology providers, we often can assist with other needs.

If you’re having difficulty connecting to another data center or to the cloud of your choice, we can help!

Worried about cybersecurity? We’re only a phone call away.

Are you in need of new hardware? Talk with us.

Want help with monitoring your internet connectivity outside of our data centers? We offer monitoring services and would be glad to assist you. (Our NOCs are staffed by experts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.)

We’re proud of our blended bandwidth capabilities, but we’ve worked hard to be helpful in other ways too.

FIBERTOWN is Ready with Blended Bandwidth

To summarize, blended bandwidth is a must when your business relies on internet connectivity (which is most organizations these days!). With our blended bandwidth, we’ve peered with multiple ISPs to offer you a redundant, reliable, and fast way to move data. By “blending” ISPs, we’re able to reduce costs for you too. In other words, you save money because we’ve negotiated with the individual providers.

If you have questions or want to learn more about our blended bandwidth (or other services mentioned in this article), use this form to contact us.

Latest Service Updates 0

FIBERTOWN’s Internet Management and Monitoring Services

We’re frequently asked if we offer internet management and monitoring services outside of our data centers. To this question, we answer a resounding YES!

This article highlights key elements of our internet management and monitoring services outside of our data center. Yes, you read that right. Outside of our data center. We do the tedious, time-sensitive tasks necessary to maintain internet connectivity. (For example, most people hate contacting their internet provider when they lose connectivity. But we don’t mind! And that’s just one perk of these services.)

Keep reading below to learn more. And if you have questions, feel free to complete the contact form so we can answer them.

An Example of Internet Management and Monitoring Services

If you’re unfamiliar with these types of services, here’s a simple example. You’re a growing company with five locations in the U.S. Each location needs bandwidth, and you (or a network engineer or CTO) will have to contract with an internet service provider (ISP) for each of the five sites. Often, ISPs differ throughout U.S. regions so it’s likely not one contract, but multiple ones for your company.

With this model, your various ISP contracts have different start dates, end dates, bandwidth allotments, etc. That’s a lot to juggle!

With FIBERTOWN’s internet management and monitoring services, we do the behind-the-scenes work for your company. We find you the best ISPs and present just one contract to your business.

You don’t worry about start and end dates. We do. You don’t worry about making calls when the internet is down. We do. You don’t chase down credit from your ISP when it fails to uphold your service level agreement (SLA). We do.

Below is more information about these critical components of our internet management and monitoring services.

Shop ISPs on Your Behalf

With 25 years in the data center industry, we’ve developed long-term, healthy relationships with ISPs all over the U.S. (and the world). We leverage those relationships, plus perform in-depth research to find your organization the best ISP for your location. Not only does this save your group a lot of work, but it often saves you money. We always seek the ISPs with the best price without compromising quality.

Hold the Internet Contracts

This element saves your organization so many headaches! It allows for MUCH easier management of contracts including term lengths, speeds, etc. Every detail is on one document for you. And if you have questions, ask us rather than figuring out which site is served by which ISP.

Monitor Internet Bandwidth

No business likes to be without internet! And your teams can’t function long without it either! So, we offer a range of internet monitoring – from a simple ping to full monitoring for flaps or packet loss. We’ll open tickets on your company’s behalf to resolve any internet issues.

And this is the key – You’ll have a human responding and working on any issue within 15 minutes.

FIBERTOWN’s monitoring saves you (or your IT managers) the hassle of waking up at 2 a.m. to submit a help ticket. We can do this because we have multiple network operation centers (NOCs) staffed with professionals to assist you and give you added peace of mind. Anyone can monitor the link and eventually “get around to it.” But if you want a problem addressed quickly, choose FIBERTOWN.

Pursue Credit on Your Behalf if the SLA Isn’t Honored

Truthfully, this is an element of service rarely needed. We strive to contract with upstanding ISPs. But in the unusual case that your SLA is not maintained (which is typically a 95% or 99+% uptime), we’ll work to get your company credit from the ISP for time lost. There’s no back-and-forth between you and the ISP. We handle all of that. And all the credit is passed straight to you!

FIBERTOWN’s Internet Management and Monitoring Services Save You Time, Money, and Headaches

FIBERTOWN developed these services several years ago after clients continued asking for assistance with monitoring and bandwidth – finding ideal providers, managing contracts, and maintaining strong internet connections.

We listened, and we’re proud to offer these services to our current data center clients…and to organizations who aren’t data center customers. (This service is an option for any company!)

Let your IT team focus on what they do best. And let FIBERTOWN manage your bandwidth contracts and monitor your sites to make sure they stay up and get repaired quickly.

Complete this form to talk with us more about internet management and monitoring services.

Data Center Latest 0

Your New Year’s Resolution – To Choose the Right Data Center

Each January, many of us set goals or choose a word or phrase as a focus for the new year. It’s our attempt to leave behind bad habits or anything that didn’t work and to look ahead to the possibilities. Businesses do this as well. January is a month for wiping the slate clean and getting a fresh start.

If your company knows it needs better protection for its hardware or is outgrowing its on-premise data center, then set a goal this year to choose the right data center.

We’ve taken the guesswork out of this process by creating a checklist to guide your data center search.

How This Checklist Helps Determine the Best Data Center for Your Company

Selecting a new data center or making the decision for colocation services is not an easy choice. Your budget, personnel, quality of your hardware, and business needs all play into the decision. Plus, fancy marketing language from facilities vying for your business and the “this is how we’ve always done it” mindset from your company leaders may affect the decision too.

Therefore, we created this checklist to help potential clients focus on the aspects of the data center itself. It removes all the distractions so you’re considering only the quality of the data center. Because that’s the first step in choosing an ideal one for your organization.

What Constitutes a Quality Data Center

When you resolve to select a data center, you’ll start by considering the most talked about, most popular features – connectivity, security, and power. Our checklist takes these critical features and breaks them down into the specific elements that constitute them.

For example, when a facility claims to have backup power, what does that mean? Are there generators onsite? Are there single points of failure?

When describing connectivity, is the data center located along major fiber routes and connectivity corridors? Does the facility offer enterprise-grade blended connectivity with 100% SLA? Does the data center have dual-entry connectivity to lessen the impact of unexpected interruptions?

When you use this checklist, you’ll know the questions, plus many more, to ask and the details to seek. No guesswork on your part.

Don’t Forget to Consider These Factors for a Data Center

We’ve found in over 25 years of business that people truly matter. It may sound strange for a data center, a business deeply entrenched in technology and the latest innovations, to write about the need for humans. Yet, when we poll our clients, we get consistent, positive feedback about our personnel who monitor the hardware in our two data centers in Houston and Bryan, Texas. We have real people working inside our data centers 24/7/365 so clients have eyes and hands in place to help if needed.

In your search for a data center, we encourage you to consider more than technology. Ask questions to learn about the onsite staff. Are they knowledgeable and well-trained? Does the data center provide visual inspections to assist with remote troubleshooting? Do you get a human response to a request within 15 minutes? (If your equipment goes down, time to repair is the most important factor.)

In our checklist, we’ve included these considerations and many others. They help you determine if you’re partnering with the most reliable and the most well-monitored data center available to you.

FIBERTOWN’s Data Centers in Houston and Bryan, TX Make the Grade

This checklist is thorough and a great resource in your search for a quality facility. It assesses features from a data center’s financial health to its reinforced roof structure for chillers and pumps to its multiple utility feeds for customer equipment. And these features just scratch the surface of what you’ll find on the checklist.

Get it here. And we wish you well in your New Year’s resolution to find the perfect data center.

(Pardon us for bragging, but we score very high on this checklist.)