Data393 Virtualizes Services with Inkra

By Philbert Shih

July 26, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY

REVIEW) -- With another big announcement this week, virtualization

technology continued its push to reshape how service providers deliver

IP services to their customers.

Inkra Networks (inkra.com),

a leading developer of virtualization technology for network services,

announced on Monday that Web hosting and managed services provider

Data393 (data393.com) is the

latest company to adopt Inkra's virtualization technology, deploying

the 1504 GX Virtual Service Switch in its Denver, Colorado data center

facility.

Data393 joins Comdepot, Savvis, EDS and IBM as the latest service providers to move to the Inkra platform over the last year.

Inkra's VSS is a network management

device that virtualizes, consolidates and automates the delivery of IP

services. Deployed in its data center, the VSS allows Data393 to

configure, modify, scale and deliver firewall, load balancing and

virtual private network services to its customers from a single

platform. The VSS also allows other services, such as intrusion

detection and prevention and SSL acceleration, to be added.

Data393 decided to migrate to Inkra

because of the various cost, scalability and management issues it was

experiencing with its previous service delivery configuration. Prior to

deploying Inkra's VSS, Data393's infrastructure was built similar to

most of the industry, explains Dave Roberts CTO of Inkra Networks,

consisting of multiple single-function devices from vendors like Cisco (cisco.com), Checkpoint (checkpoint.com) and Foundry (foundrynet.com).

With this type of setup, Data393 found that it was costly just to buy

the equipment and even more taxing to manage and maintain the overall

solution, says Roberts.

Both the operational and capital costs

continued to grow as Data393's business expanded. Earlier this year,

Data393 was part of a three-way merger with Huge Hosting and Ventures Online,

a move that significantly expanded its customer base. Following the

growth, Data393 found itself doing more work in multiple data center

locations.

"What they were finding was that they

were actually growing their business, but they were not getting the

economies of scale that you would expect from a growing business,"

explains Roberts. "It seemed like the more business that they did, the

more their costs escalated."

Migrating to Inkra's platform addressed

most of Data393's problems. In Data393's estimation, consolidating its

services into a single device helped it cut the cost of purchasing new,

non-virtualized equipment by 80 percent.

Inkra's VSS also cut labor and

operational costs. Virtualization allows service providers to deliver

IP services electronically with the click of a mouse. As a result,

everything can be done from a remote location, dramatically reducing

the need to send out operations staff to the site, something that is

required in a non-virtualized environment and can get very complicated

when there are multiple facilities and staff members that are only

trained for certain types of equipment. With virtualization, service

providers are able to significantly slash these costs by removing the

need for manual labor.

"You don't have the cabling issue and the

manual labor that goes along with ... connecting one box to another

box. All of the configuration and setup can actually be done

electronically," says Roberts. "Rather than sending guys out to a data

center and having to do things manually, what [virtualization] allows

you to do is leverage your operations staff a lot better."

Virtualization also accelerates service

provisioning and provides scalability that allows vendors to

conveniently add new services that they can upsell to customers. "It

allows them a new revenue opportunity to sell something they didn't

otherwise sell before," says Roberts, emphasizing that the incremental

cost of adding that capability is very small. Because the VSS

consolidates multiple services, service providers do not have to add

new single-function equipment, figure out how to integrate them with

their current configuration or engage in any new training. According to

Data393, in the first month after deploying the VSS, it was able to

reduce the engineering time required to turn up services by 50 percent.

"Inkra's virtualized switches reduce the

cost, time, and complexity of scaling and delivering new services,

which provides us with a competitive advantage by enabling us to easily

configure, deploy, and scale new services in a matter of hours," Adam

Hudson, CTO of Data393 said in a release.

Finally, another benefit of

virtualization is that it is much more forgiving, with less opportunity

for mistakes. "You get fewer mistakes in configuration because of the

fact that you've got everything under one management umbrella,"

explains Roberts. "Instead of having to put multiple products together,

figure out the configuration interfaces and make it compatible ... you

can do it all in one system and you can see the whole configuration on

one screen."

Inkra's push to virtualize the various

added services of the hosting world has an interesting effect. Each new

big customer signing, says Roberts, validates the company's platform.

But what's more, the dramatic changes in methods that accompany these

customer wins validate the whole virtualized philosophy of service

delivery.

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