Intelligent Managed Services

Apologies to those interested only in our Voice services but I’d like to take a few moments to introduce a side to Simwood which many are possibly unaware of – our Managed Services. Whilst some will tell you what they are planning to do, we tend to concentrate on ‘doing’ and often overlook telling prospective customers about it! I hope to catch up by outlining a few services that are available today.

It should hopefully be no surprise that we offer co-location and dedicated services. These run in our data centres leveraging the same IP network as our own business and benefitting from our peering relationships, which include numerous VoIP providers and carriers. We are not mass-market hosting providers but underpin a number of VoIP providers and community projects hosting the voice elements of their infrastructure on our network.

Simwood operates a vSphere Enterprise cloud. vSphere is the ultimate solution for virtualisation and represents a significant investment for us over recent years. vSphere virtual machines enjoy practical bare metal performance which when you consider our typical underlying host has 24 processor cores and 96GB RAM available you should correctly conclude that virtualisation no longer represents a performance compromise. It does however present massive opportunity for dynamic scaling, high availability and flexibility. We have migrated a large proportion of our own non-media services (e.g. billing, messaging and web) to VMs as well as virtualising key parts of customer infrastructure, both with great results. I should also highlight that virtualisation is fully integrated with our other services such that a given customer can have VMs and co-located kit all together on the same private network. As you’ll read next, that network can even include your office!

Imagine if all your data centres and offices were together in the same building, bringing ultra high-speed connectivity to the office and massive simplification of the connection to the data centre. You might use VLANs to enforce QoS or you might leverage high bandwidth services without worrying about VPNs or routing between sites. Replication of databases etc. would become quicker and simpler as they’d all be together on the same network. Well, that is a reality you can offer your UK customers today, or exploit yourself, through Simwood Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet itself is an optical ethernet link between two sites, or an ethernet cloud linking many sites, without the complications of routing or protocol conversion that go with leased lines, SDSL and other solutions. At one end, typically your or your customer’s office, we’d present up to four patch leads, each one representing a VLAN with its own QoS rules. The other end could be a Simwood router (to offer you a high performance leased line replacement), it could be your own customer network at Simwood (to join your office to your data centre) or it could be one of your other sites/data centres. Other customers have even used the VLANs to offer separate leased line replacements for multiple businesses in the same building whilst sharing the cost of the basic capacity.

Speeds range from 1-100Mb/s delivered to the premise entirely over fibre and costs are typically significantly less than a leased line – there is no complication to fund or legacy network to subsidise! For a quote, please let us have the UK post-code you’d like service to and a description of what you’d like at the other end (e.g. Simwood Transit to replace a leased line, or a patch to your co-lo network etc., or the postcode of a second site).