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• Infrastructure
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Managed Hosting - Infrastructure

Diskless Infrastructure is designed to deliver continuous service and performance for the most demanding applications, with virtually infinite scaling and disaster recovery built in. Diskless Infrastructure is the Managed Hosting platform of choice for a wide variety of customers such as FTSE 250 companies, digital agencies and central government.

Diskless Infrastructure is Ultraspeed's flagship product and utilises all the standard Diskless elements: managed load balancing, managed firewall, enterprise storage infrastructure and virtualisation. Diskless Infrastructure is specifically designed to enable customers to deploy multiple virtual servers on each physical server. The key difference from Diskless Simple is that each customer utilising Diskless Infrastructure has dedicated physical servers; this means more power in the trunk and more flexibility for rapid scaling.

Ultraspeed has built its Diskless platform using only best-of-breed enterprise technology. Ultraspeed is a VMWare Partner and a member of 3PAR's Cloud Agile programme. Other best-of-breed technologies are deployed from vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, Rackable Systems and Extreme.

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Storage and Disaster Recovery

All storage (data, operating system etc) is off server on Ultraspeed's Storage platform, a key element of Ultraspeed's Diskless platform. More storage can be added to customer environments at anytime, and is purchased in blocks of 10GB. Such is the nature of the platform that customers can scale up their storage requirements rapidly and transparently.

Ultraspeed includes weekly offsite data replication to Ultraspeed's Diskless platform in Amsterdam. Although for most customers this frequency is sufficient, some customers have more demanding requirements. On this basis, Ultraspeed can offer daily or hourly asynchronous data replication as an upgrade from the normal weekly service.

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Managed Load Balancing

Ultraspeed offers a Layer 4-7 managed load balancing service based on its enterprise Foundry platform. Pairs of high availability Foundry devices are deployed as part of Ultraspeed's network infrastructure to provide multiple gigabits of intelligent routing and switching. Ultraspeed provides the load balancing service on a per server basis. Therefore, if you require load balancing across two web servers, this would equate to taking two service "blocks".

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Managed Firewall

Ultraspeed offers a sophisticated and powerful managed firewall service based on its Juniper platform. High availability pairs of Juniper firewalls are arranged on a per rack basis and managed by Ultraspeed's security specialists.

Each customer is provisioned in a separate security zone and virtual network, extended all the way down to the servers. This provides full separation from other customers and the reassurance of having a completely isolated, secure environment. Please see our Security section for more information.

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Ultraspeed Diskless Versus Traditional Disk-based Managed Hosting

	Ultraspeed Diskless solutions	Disk-based (typical) solutions
15-minute hardware replacement guarantee	Yes	No
RAID-5	Yes	Depends
Fibre Channel Drive storage	Yes	No
Risk of local hard drive failure	No	Yes
Infinitely scalable storage	Yes	No
Transparent hardware upgrades	Yes	No
Fast storage upgrades	Yes	No
Server less backups	Yes	No
>15-minute Bare Metal	Yes	No
OS rollback	Yes	No
32 days incremental block-based backups	Yes	No

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