How LoadSpring Evaluates Technology to Optimize Customer ROI

By Cameron Vixie, Chief Technology Officer

At LoadSpring, our engineers are always hot on the trail of improvements in technology to serve you better as our customer. Our dedicated test lab and our relationships with best-of-breed providers let us continually put the latest server, networking, storage, monitoring, and security devices through their paces, to make sure we optimize the solutions we put in place for you.

Our four-step technology evaluation process is strict – no favors for the undeserving!

We compare features and functionality with our currently used products.
We perform a risk analysis of the product or technology against our current system.
We analyze performance, looking specifically for application performance improvements for our end users.
We assess the vendor, including vendor ability to meet our support demands to ensure maximum uptime for our customers.

We keep our ears to the ground too, attending trade shows and working with new vendors to beta test new products before they are released to the public. Here are just some of the advantages we now bring to customers, thanks to painstaking selection of the best technology.

Servers – Adapting to Your Needs

We have our eye on the best performance/price ratio possible for server technology from all major vendors. That way, we make sure that if anything goes through the roof, it’s the results you get from our services.

You get access to the best technology rapidly, thanks to our deployment in a 100% virtualized environment.
We scale resources up or down at your request, leveraging our LoadSpring expertise as a leading cloud solutions provider.
You get the fastest performance from the servers you use with use, thanks to our automatic balancing of high workload systems, using DRS technology.
You see no impact from maintenance activities: we perform live migration of virtual machines as needed, so that your own business activities can continue to run seamlessly on our servers.
Should a physical host ever fail, your virtual machines are automatically restarted on a different host system, using HA (high availability) technology.

Networking – Speed and Security for You

Your communications benefit from the lowest possible latency for the fastest possible application performance for your users, because we run all customer data across a very fast (10GB) network.
Your applications get access to resources and benefit from secure SSL connections thanks to LoadSpring’s load balancers that also allow us to offer you high application availability.
Your large files zip through the network, as we leverage industry-leading WAN acceleration from vendor Riverbed.
User experience consistency for your staff, together with network performance, can be provided via MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) connections to directly connect our datacenter to your network.

Storage – Smart Choices for Performance and Cost-Effectiveness

We leverage multiple tiers of storage to provide the right performance for your application(s). Long term storage is placed on adaptive flash arrays, while high performance databases are deployed to solid state arrays. These systems reduce disk latency, improve seek times and overall improve application performance for you.

Security – Protection and Prevention at All Levels

LoadSpring’s engineers are constantly working to improve our security and your security too. While no network is 100% safe from attack, we create layers of security through thorough risk analysis, to protect your most important assets, your accounts and your data.

We detect and prevent intrusions and threats as they happen, thanks to our advanced IDS/IPS installations. Our layered firewall systems further protect your data:

External threats to the datacenter are trapped by firewalls configured in an active-passive pair. Restricting communications to HTTPS or SFTP, these systems first route all outside traffic to access webservers, which only then communicate with our backend systems.
Another layer of advanced protection for your data is created by internal next generation firewalls in an active-passive pair. Instead of using traditional port based rules to filter traffic, we inspect it and only allow through the traffic for specific applications.

And as an extra measure, we use internal and external firewalls from different vendors to reduce any risk of critical data loss.

Disaster Recovery – Back on Your Feet Fast

Your data is backed up AND the backup restores work properly. How do we know? Because we test once a week to ensure all backed-up data can be properly recovered. Frequency of backup of all customer data can be from 24 hours down to as little as 15 minutes depending on your needs.
Your data is replicated to a geographically distinct location, in a way that is compatible with your RPO (recovery point objective). Replication can be from every 24 hours down to as little as every 15 minutes.
Your RTO (recovery time objective) can be as low as 15 minutes, as our virtual technology powers on systems automatically in a remote datacenter, in case of local failure.

After all that, what else can we say but “Hope you enjoy the rest of your day and all the best for your business!” Thanks to our attention to technology that helps you perform better, those wishes should both now come true.