Fully managed services vs. managing your own servers

There are many advantages of using Managed Servers rather than buying your own hardware. Consider:

Start up Cost - Capex vs. Opex

Although owning your own servers can seem like a stable, long-term solution the costs associated with implementing it can quickly compromise companies budgeted expenditure. A Managed Hosting environment eases this burden by offering carrier grade shared infrastructure that is resilient and scalable.

This enables companies to reduce their Capex and spreads the costs over the term of the contact as a Opex cost, also importantly companies can achieve ROI are a more rapid rate.

Hardware Depreciation Issues

Server components depreciate at the rate at which tech. advancements increase. Whether advancements in chip sets, sas drives or network upgrades, keeping up with demands of growing online presence can result in unplanned systematic technical refreshes. These increase costs and lengthen the ROI. By off loading the responsibility of owning the hardware the burden of financial depreciation is passed on.

Overall Maintenance

One of the key considerations when contemplating selective sourcing is the costs of efficiently and effectively maintaining it and the risks if this is not done properly. By selecting a solution offered by Macquarie you are guaranteed the highest service levels in the Australia, we recognise the need for services to be “also on” and have built our facility and service offering based on this principle. With the managed offering, you have automatic access to the hardware spares pools on on site experts that will minimise outage time should the worst happen.

IT Skill Set Access

Macquarie Hosting has over 30 engineers that manage your infrastructure 24*7*365. The engineers are highly skilled and certified in many different disciplines including but not limited to NOC admin and management, security specialists, back up specialists, lead engineers (multi skilled), Microsoft/ Redhat/ VMware specialists, project managers. It is this highly capable team that will maintain and look after the infrastructure as part of the fully managed service. Otherwise you would need you own team of infrastructure specialists to manage the infrastructure.

Controlled Rapid Growth

The aggressive businesses that we work with often need to scale very rapidly due to the success of their application, we have many years at helping companies achieve this even in the most unforeseen of circumstances, at Macquarie we quickly can rapidly develop and deploying new infrastructure in a controlled cost effective and risk adverse fashion. This is achieved by implementing control and consistency from day one by assigning skilled project manager and lead engineer to every project. The team that deploys your first server is often the one that deploys your 10th or 50th so they know and understand and special configuration that you require, in essence they become an extension of your IT team.

Maintaining Business Focus

The businesses that Macquarie supports are successful. This is achieved by the businesses being able to focus all their activity and resources in the right areas I.e. where the greatest business advantages can be achieved. When managing technology the greatest advantage is usually in the application layer. The task of proactively and continuously managing the infrastructure layer often frustrates and distracts application developers so sometimes this is overlooked however the importance of a sound and solid foundation can not be underestimated, this is where the Macquarie fully managed service becomes critical to the success of the business.

Peace of Mind, Best Practices Process and People

Macquarie Hosting is the most highly certified business hosting company in Australia. We are the first and only data centre to hold the ISO27001, AS/BS7799, SunTone, Red hat, ASIO and DSD certifications. This provides our clients with peace of mind that the people, processes as well as the physical location are secure and running to industry best practise.

Costs you need to incorporate into a cost analysis for own vs. managed.

• Hardware and maintenance agreements (time to respond by HW vendor, what this means)
• Software licenses
• Engineers to Manage servers 24*7*365
• External contractor if skills required are outside your engineers
• Data Centre services (any hands and feet costs)
• Insurance costs

Other key factors to be aware of

• Management time for the above
• What internal skills do you have easy access to
• Time to respond - Hardware replacement
• Time for your engineer to get to a server rack at 2am in the morning
• What happens if your engineers are away on holiday and the worst happens
• Engineer moral, do they want to focus on infrastructure management or the application
• Cost to business of the engineer focusing on the HW not the Application

Server lease vs. Buy next steps

Contact us for more information on Managed Dedicated Servers for your critical application hosting.