Few Directors of large, geographically distributed network and server inventories would deny the benefits that consolidating smaller servers, currently deployed in regional offices and locations, into larger systems in professionally managed data centres can bring.

OPEX, Software licensing, depreciation and maintenance are all candidates for significant cost reduction in such a scheme, not to mention clear improvements in service availability and delivered service quality.

But all of the investment necessary to make such ambitious projects a success will be for nothing if the wide and metropolitan area network services you choose to use are not up the job – or down to the price points you need.

To help illustrate how Fibernet are able to help you plan, implement and manage your server consolidation program, we've put together this simple 5 step guide. It will help you understand the contribution we can make throughout your project lifecycle and also the value of our foundation network service for server consolidation - Ethersphere.

We hope you find it helpful. If you'd like to follow up with us, please click here, let us know how to make contact, and we'll be back to you shortly.

We'll help you plan your Ethersphere network service

First, we'll need to know what you are using to connect your regional offices at the moment. We'll need to understand any problems you have with it, so we can plan to sort them with your new services. You'll have a budget in mind and, as we tie together the three pictures of where you currently are with your network and where you need to be, and with your expectation of how much you're prepared to pay for the service, we'll be able to give you a clear idea of what we can provide.

You should be prepared for some pleasant surprises, especially if you are currently using technologies like ATM, Frame Relay or dedicated private circuits. You'll find that Ethernet services will be pretty compelling if you are currently using 2Mbit or more to each location. To give you a rough idea, it's not unusual for 10Mbit of Ethernet service to cost the same as 2Mbit of traditional service.

Now's the time to think about those servers too. Take a look at the servers in the branches together with your IT and MIS colleagues. Look at the traffic levels between the PCs and the Servers. Analyse the utilisation of the LAN. Will those traffic levels fit comfortably on the new Ethernet service? Often, they will. In which case the next steps are easy...start planning both projects!

If the levels of traffic are higher than the available bandwidth, the project may well still be a "go-er"! You need to take a look at some innovative technologies from Cisco. Collectively, they are called Cisco File Engine Series Appliances. They are designed specifically to help in the situation above. The idea is that you still move all of your branch servers to the datacentre, but, to help rationalise the amount of traffic that goes through the WAN, you put these intelligent caching appliances into the branches between the LAN and the WAN. They are inexpensive and cost MUCH less to run than branch servers and amongst other things, they restrict the amount of data across the WAN to only those records and blocks of data that actually changes rather than whole files.

We've got a specialist storage partner who can help you with these.

By now, you'll have a very clear idea of what can be achieved, what the costs will be and what benefits you'll accrue.

At this stage, we'll discuss with you how best to financially structure any deal between us. We'll discuss timescales, contract term, payment profiles and the balance between up-front installation costs and recurring annual service charges. You'll find we're as flexible with commercial terms as we are in the design and implementation of our services.

Assuming it all makes sense, we proceed to the next stage – detailed design.

With your budget approved it's time to start the detailed design of your new Ethernet Network Service

This is where Fibernet's strengths really start to show. We don't have just one Ethernet service nationally, we have three! They are called TANet Etherline, TANet Ethersphere and TANet Ethernet Bespoke. We won't describe them here (See links on the right of the page for that). Suffice it to say that they offer you the broadest range of options you are likely to find from any one supplier and that, as our name suggests, we specialise in customising and adapting them to meet individual customer needs.

Remember too that Ethernet's potentially huge capacity (It is quite practical to engineer private services that run at multi-gigabit levels).

We'll engage our account managers and systems engineers at this stage to work with you on the design. You can expect them to...

• discuss sites to be connected and present service and equipment options. Remember that every Fibernet design is bespoke and individual to each customer. We'll work hard to help you maximise the re-use of existing equipment.

• confirm the technical design of the MAN (if it's relevant) and WAN taking into account project phasing and deployment considerations.

• confirm performance, scalability and resilience options.

• agree service levels and online service reporting features.

• confirm equipment modules, configuration, upgrade routes, availability and any potential partnerships. We'll involve specialist staff from our partners as appropriate.

• agree with you who is going to supply what to whom and when, and agree our role in your plan. Specifically we'll discuss how the final service will be managed and what each of us will be accountable for.

• propose a commercial profile for payment that makes sense to both of us and present all of this information in a fully costed proposal. If you agree to our proposal we'll proceed to contract.

Once we've agreed contracts we'll start to implement your network

Now's when the action begins

Every project is very different. We'd like to reassure you that our project managers are ‘Prince 2' trained, that our processes are ISO9001:2000 approved and that we have executed many projects of this type before. With network service contract renewal rates' running at over 99% our track record speaks for itself.

You can look forward to:

• A detailed and pre-agreed site by site project plan.

• Professional project management and regular project reviews.

• Provisioning teams who will manage installation of 3rd party circuits required having gained agreement from your landlords.

• When required, our civil engineering teams will undertake any civil engineering work needed to install new fibre routes.

• Managed procurement, installation and configuration of Equipment that often we'll stage at our premises prior to deployment at yours.

• Professionally managed installation work, using our own teams of qualified and appropriately trained engineers together with any agreed building wiring and engineering works.

• Where appropriate, we'll connect either your existing or your new LAN infrastructure to the new Ethersphere service and test our agreed Quality of Service profiles, prior to connecting any new storage caching appliances, NAS appliances, servers or switches.

• We'll arrange any network management connections from our network management centre to the new equipment and test them. Finally we'll introduce you to our online reporting and service assurance systems and show you how you can obtain your own view of network performance.

• Assuming everything has gone to plan we'll ask you to sign off the new service against criteria we both agreed beforehand.

With your service live it's time to think about management

So what can you expect?

Every contract for service will have as a core component a service level agreement. Every one is unique. It's not unusual for them to stipulate very high levels of service availability and where this is the case we will have both agreed a design that we know can deliver the goods.

You can expect a proactive monitoring service 24x7x365 from our dual network operations centres.

You can expect appropriately skilled engineers to be despatched to site in the event of alerts that require manual intervention, within response times we have pre-agreed.

You can expect us to manage equipment faults, bugs, upgrades, maintenance and replacement if necessary. You decide what you need based upon your own skills and abilities - we fit in to fill the gaps.

You may have asked for service performance reports and statistics and where this is the case we will collate and deliver them to you - perhaps via our customer extranet (It's called TANet NOW!).

You might also have asked for your management systems to be connected to ours. When this is the case we will have agreed who responds to what kind of alerts.

You can also, of course, expect us to look after all of the equipment, whether it has been procured as a part of a full managed service contract (integrating LAN and WAN components) or as separate elements covered by individual maintenance contracts.

It's working now, but can we improve the service?

A regular part of any managed services contract is the formal service level review. It's a meeting between your team and ours, the purpose of which is not only to review performance, agreeing corrective actions where necessary, but also to discuss future plans on both sides.

These service level reviews are important. Fibernet prides itself on exceptional service - a conviction supported by our close to 100% renewal rate of managed service contracts.

The Ethernet networking technologies we deploy are very flexible. They need to be. Your organisation will constantly change and the configuration of the service will need to change as well. We'll propose a formal change control process that will give you the flexibility to handle small in flight changes as well as more significant events like the opening of new sites or relocation of departments between existing locations.

At your invitation, you'll find we are very willing to share our own internal plans for service enhancement and upgrade as well as our forward technology roadmaps. Whilst not appealing to everyone, such disclosures can form a helpful part of your own planning processes.

Remember too that with more than 18 years in the Local and Wide Area networking business, Fibernet's pedigree and experience is 2nd to none.

Your investment in these services is significant. Our goal is to reward that investment with extraordinary service.

We hope that you have found our 5 step guide both interesting and useful. If you'd like to follow up with us, please click here, let us know how to make contact, and we'll be back to you shortly.