Layered Tech is a company providing IT infrastructure, including dedicated servers, managed hosting, and grid computing, to businesses of all sizes.
It recently added virtualization technology to its offerings, and participated in the Microsoft Go-Live program for the Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-VTM virtualization technology, which permitted the company to deliver services based on Hyper-V to customers even before the product's official release.
Jeremy Suo-Anttila, chief technology officer at Layered Tech, said "With the advances in server hardware technology, each dedicated server is providing a great deal more resources than is generally needed. I log into many servers a day, and I often see that as much as 80 percent of a server's resources is not being used, which means that customers are paying for processing power, memory, disk space, and bandwidth that they aren't taking advantage of."
So the company wanted to adopt virtualization "because it can enable our customers to consolidate their hosted servers, which saves them money," he said.
With its new virtualization offering, Layered Tech can create a more efficient, easy-to- manage hosting environment, company officials say, adding that cost-savings as a result of virtualization are passed on to the company's customers, giving Layered Tech "a competitive advantage in the marketplace."
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OPC officials have announced that their Technical Support Department "continues to be rated 'Excellent' by our customers month after month."
The company "understands the importance of service after the sale and offers a survey after each technical support session," company officials say, adding that January customer support surveys reflected a 90 percent "Excellent" rating along with 8 percent "Good," 1 percent "Fair" and only 1 disappointed -- "that turned into an 'Excellent' rating."
In fact, among the comments the company's received are "great! Eric fixed me in a matter of moments," "Nice to have someone that will work with you so fast and so friendly," "Excellent tech support, had a good conversation" and "The support technician was very helpful and the remote support tool is great."
The company sells predictive dialers, and lists several advantages of the product including the fact that it manages the process of dialing tens of thousands of calls or tens of millions of calls in its lifetime as well as detects the result of the call. As an example: no answer, busy, fax, bad number, answering machine without any presence of human expertise - consequently saving time by only transferring calls which are voice connects to the agents locally or remotely.
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Hosted PBX phones are changing how small and medium-sized businesses serve their customers, grow their business, and support their employees.
According to officials of Vocalocity, a vendor in the space, delivering the same enterprise- level phone system capabilities large businesses use at a much lower cost, "hosted PBX is helping SMBs save money while putting their customer services on par with much larger organizations."
Large enterprises, of course, get to enjoy the cost advantages and capabilities of enterprise IP telephony. On-site IP Private Branch eXchange systems can require significant initial investment and ongoing operational costs that put them out of reach for SMBs, which have generally had to make do with what Vocalocity officials say are "inflexible, expensive traditional phone systems or residential-grade voice over IP with limited functionality and flexibility, and less than business-grade performance."
Vocalocity is offering what company officials say is "a cost-effective, feature-rich alternative to on-premises IP PBXs and traditional analog phone systems expressly designed for the needs of small and medium-sized businesses." Called VocalocityPBX, it's a hosted PBX product, offering "state-of-the-art features, seamless scalability, and unparalleled ease-of- use all in a low-risk, low total cost of ownership package."
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In data centers, avoiding downtime is key. Temperature and humidity fluctuations, hot spots, and other environmental factors can wreak havoc on server hardware and cause costly outages. Additionally, increased power usage not only leads to higher operating costs but can be an indication of an imminent issue.
Good airflow is vitally important and must be monitored to ensure air exchange is handled properly, and of course flooding or wetness in a data center could be disastrous.
Nick Larkin of Sensicast Systems has written recently on some best practices for data center temperature monitoring using wireless sensor networks. According to him, these tools "can be deployed in data centers, providing environmental data and alerts, reducing costs, and ensuring server uptime."
Some such systems have advantages over traditional monitoring systems, including the following considerations:
Cost savings. Traditional monitoring systems typically require the costly process of pulling wire through the facility. Some wireless architecture, including SensiNet's, eliminates the need for this.
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