Colt launches performance-guaranteed shared storage service for enterprises

Colt announces the launch of its performance-guaranteed shared storage service. Based on all solid state disk (SSD) technology, this new service enables customers to move data and workloads seamlessly between different storage tiers, and instantly increase storage performance and volume on demand. Colt’s enterprise customers can now benefit from guaranteed service levels usually associated with dedicated storage, at shared storage prices. The service complements Colt’s enterprise class cloud services and will be deployed across Colt’s European data centres.

To date, enterprise customers have faced a number of limitations with shared storage services including the potential performance impact created by other platform users, often referred to as “noisy neighbours”. Based on SolidFire’s all-SSD technology, the Colt service has been designed to guarantee volume performance regardless of the activity of other applications sharing the infrastructure. This design allows Colt to meet the quality of service levels essential for business critical applications and to provide the service at highly attractive commercial rates.

Fully integrated with Colt’s enterprise services portal, this innovative service also gives customers control so that they can move workloads, applications and data across tiers of storage instantly. Authorised members of the IT department can access the service online, allowing them to simply and easily move data between tiers without the risk of reduction in performance, or taking critical business applications offline at anytime. As a result, IT can match service levels to the criticality of their business applications, simply and easily.

“Colt’s new high-performance, shared storage service allows us to meet growing customer demand with performance guarantees that are not available anywhere else in the industry,” said Jon Bennett, VP Portfolio & Strategy, Colt Technology Services. “Guaranteed performance, coupled with 24x7 service level availability, make Colt’s new shared storage services the enterprise grade that our customers expect. We now make it possible for our customers to deploy a far greater number of business critical applications utlilising the most predictable and efficient enterprise class cloud across Europe.”

Bennett concludes: “Colt’s new storage offering combines the performance guarantee essential for our customer’s business critical applications with highly competitive commercials, and the ability to simply and easily dial-up and dial-down high performance storage. We believe that this shared storage service combined with our market-leading network, communications and IT services will prove highly disruptive in the European cloud services marketplace.”

“Colt’s move to an all-SSD storage infrastructure signals a strong commitment to meet their customers’ increasing demand for high performance shared storage services, said SolidFire Founder and CEO, Dave Wright. “Colt clearly understands what enterprises need when buying and consuming cloud services. They are bringing innovative services to market ahead of their competitors and we look forward to working closely with them across Europe.”

This new enterprise grade shared storage service is part of Colt Optimum services for IT and will complement the Optimum infrastructure, platform and workload services designed specifically for enterprises. Colt Optimum is the name of the direct-to-enterprise portfolio across IT, Network and Communication Services. These services are differentiated by their unique combination of network reach, integrated technology, service management and commercial flexibility. They complement Colt Ceano, which is designed specifically for Colt’s indirect channel.