data center | FIBERTOWN BLOG

Hands and Eyes Support Services – Remote Data Center Management for Your Company

At FIBERTOWN, we try hard to listen to customers’ comments so we can better tailor our services to their needs. A remark we hear often from companies is how helpful Hands and Eyes Support is to their IT departments.

Our customers rest a lot easier knowing we’re ready to help if they need us!

In this article, we describe our Hands and Eyes Support services. If you’re hunting for the right data center and colocation site, this article will help your search.

(We also suggest this checklist as a guide or read more about it here. Furthermore, we’ve been at this business for over 25 years. We’re well versed in the latest technology but believe personal service is the most critical component and should never waiver, no matter the newest trends.)

Each FIBERTOWN Data Center Customer Gets…

First off, every FIBERTOWN data center customer, just for being a client of ours, receives – delivery receipt/package handoff, report preparation (power usage, network, etc.), secure access coordination, security camera review, and power troubleshooting.

Also, every customer gets a human response within 15 minutes or less when there is an issue. This makes us very different from most data centers! That’s because we staff our network operation centers (NOCs) with professionals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And if we can fix the problem in under 15 minutes, there’s no additional charge. (Almost all requests are completed within this time frame so you don’t have to make a trip to the data center!)

Components of FIBERTOWN’s Hands and Eyes Support Services

Our Hands and Eyes Support option takes our already great service and elevates it to the next level.

We gave this service its name because the personnel in our 24-hour, 7-days-a-week NOCs become the “hands and eyes” for your IT department. In other words, you remotely manage your equipment in our data center using our knowledgeable personnel.

And, boy, is this support helpful! It includes everything listed below plus much more.

Server reboot
Device component replacement
Tape rotation
Visual inspection
DNS changes
Hardware installation or removal
Vendor escort
“Call me from my rack” requests
Crash cart support

How Does FIBERTOWN Hands and Eyes Support Work?

To take advantage of our Hands and Eyes Support, simply notify us that you’re ready for this premium level of service. Our number is 979.393.9100, and our email is info@fibertown.com. From there, we’ll schedule a call to discuss more details – pricing, the number of hours needed by your company, etc.

And if you decide that Hands and Eyes Support is not for your company at this time, don’t worry. Every service listed above is available to each of our clients by billable hours.

Our goal is always to give customers peace of mind. Our Hands and Eyes Support is just one more way we can do this.

Call, email, or use the form to contact us.

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.)

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Is Your Generator Reliable? Do You Have Backup Power?

On Sunday night, November 27th, Houston residents received a boil water notice. A water purification plant in the city had experienced a brief power disruption, causing water pressure to drop below the minimum requirement of 20 PSI. This drop in pressure is what caused officials to give the boil water notice as a precaution for residents.

State and local entities worked with guidance from the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality to lift the boil water notice about 40 hours later. And for that we’re grateful.

A Cautionary Tale…

This article is not intended to put down an organization. (In fact, we commend the quick, safe approach by the Houston authorities and greatly appreciate their efforts.) Instead, this article is a cautionary tale about backup power for all businesses.

We ask these serious questions.

Are the generators at your on-premise data center and/or office building reliable?
Do you have redundant power?
Are there plans in place if you lose power?
What service outages would your customers experience if you lost power completely for 2 minutes? 15 minutes? For an hour?
How much revenue would you lose? Are lives at stake if you lose power?
What damages would your hardware experience with a power loss?

You Don’t Have to Have All of the Answers

Truthfully, just typing the questions above makes our hearts beat rapidly. The ramifications of an outage for a company without backup power are expensive, time-consuming, and can cost human lives.

Power redundancy (i.e., having multiple sources of power) is a serious consideration for companies. Redundancy means reliability and peace of mind. And it’s for these reasons that clients choose a data center like FIBERTOWN.

It’s our job to have and maintain utility and generator power for your hardware. (We go into more detail about the traits of a top-rated data center in this article).

FIBERTOWN Can Keep You Up and Running

We have two data centers – one in Houston and one in Bryan-College Station. These data centers are fitted with redundant power and cooling systems. Backup generators are on site, and they are manned by IT professionals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

We’ll keep your company’s hardware up and running, even if the world outside is without power.

Ask us how we do this! We’d love to tell you more.

Complete the contact form to begin a conversation.

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Top 9 Considerations for Selecting Your Data Center

At FIBERTOWN, we believe extraordinary service should be ordinary. You should seek this same level of client commitment when you select your next data center.

Below we’ve highlighted the most important considerations. To see the full-length document about choosing a data center, use this link.

The Most Common Considerations

Location. Your data center should be away from coastlines to avoid major hurricane damage, out of flood plains, and outside of known tornado alleys. It should also have multiple routes to it and be located within driving distance for many employees.

Connectivity. The access you get to multiple telecommunications carriers is a major advantage of contracting with a data center. Therefore, ask critical questions. Is the facility carrier-neutral with diverse points of entry? If you need a high availability (HA) protocol, ask if that is an option. Is a service like Megaport, a platform that allows for a direct connection to cloud providers, available?

Reliability. Learning about reliability, or uptime, is a must. For a data center to ensure uptime, infrastructure for backup power and cooling should be in place. Inquire what a data center’s uptime is and how they accomplish this. (Hint – It should be at least five 9s or 99.999%. We at FIBERTOWN go a step further to provide 100% uptime.)

Service Level Agreement. Well-written SLAs include an assurance about response time, security protocols, bandwidth availability, and more. The SLA should also include what steps the data center will take if it fails to meet the contractual uptime.

The Most Overlooked Considerations

The remaining five considerations are more nuanced. Technology professionals in your company (or you) will guide your search for a location, connectivity, reliability, and a strong SLA. But, the other five components of a great data center relate to the humans who run it.

We can write article after article about redundant systems, circuits, cloud providers, etc., but it’s humans who are at the heart of a data center.

We discuss in more detail these human factors – reputation, on-site staffing, timeliness, workspace accommodations, and the ease of doing business – in more detail here. We’ve included questions to ask and how to gain insight into a data center’s customer relations.

Have Questions? FIBERTOWN Has Answers.

FIBERTOWN is a data center with two locations (Houston and Bryan-College Station, Texas), and we’re proud of the services we provide. The Top 9 Considerations document is a guide for choosing the best data center for your company.

Tag: data center