As a commercial data center company, Data Holdings operates secure, heavily networked redundant “edge” facilities leveraged by local business organizations to host their mission critical applications. If your business is within 100 miles of our Milwaukee or Minneapolis sites, by colocating your exact same network and server hardware, you should expect the exact same application performance as you would get if the servers were in your own office.
If Data Holdings virtually hosts that exact same software on our hardware, however, because we have standardized on 100% solid-state drives for extremely fast I/O, when we host a business’s applications on our hardware, it sees a huge uplift in application performance without having to spend a penny on new or additional software or hardware, simply because that with faster I/O, that same software now works to its capacity.
Quite often, business will see their on-site network needs outstripped by user demand at certain times of the day. High-cost employees such as engineers and designers are often rendered unproductive due to competition for available bandwidth at the start of the business day. The future will only see increased competition for bandwidth as application demands grow. All that is avoidable by hosting at Data Holdings.
Engineering firms, architectural firms, manufacturers, and product design firms use storage-intensive applications to run their business. File sizes are huge. Despite that fact, they must be highly available and quickly downloadable. Most files are kept in-house for security and ready access, but when distributed users need those files there is often insufficient bandwidth for reliable performance which makes workers unproductive.
For businesses in the financial services, hospitality, communications, healthcare or retail industries, access to an efficient, fast database is essential. If they self-host the database, they have multiple single points of failure (power, network, cooling, servers) leading to occasional prolonged outages. Placing that database in Azure or AWS is very expensive, plus it inhibits performance due to round-trip latency.
Any business within a 100-mile radius of a Data Holdings facility will ensure optimal performance of latency-sensitive applications, including databases, storage, and anything transaction oriented.
Data Holdings is served by multiple, diverse Internet carrier feeds, which are blended to deliver guaranteed network uptime at a fraction of the cost of an individual business buying bandwidth themselves. It is a purpose-built, physically secure, survivable building with redundant systems to guarantee application uptime, and is close enough for an in-house IT team to drive to if necessary.
We will often recommend a private line connection between the business site and our facilities, and an SDN box with a smaller cable, fixed wireless, or 5G wireless backup Internet feed to the site for redundancy. The private line is a secure link to between headquarters and the hosted applications. Internet service is fed directly from the data center and runs through a managed firewalls at the data center to increase security.
Businesses need their applications to remain as local as possible to their employees. Their culture demands it, key personnel are local, and the business is part of the local community fabric. Changes in physical and cyber security, plus avoiding avoidable application uptime failures have changed the rules of the game. By using Data Holdings as their hosting partner, local businesses keep their culture, retain their best people, and preserve a sense of community, all while improving the reliability, access to resources and improved productivity the future demands.
Public cloud companies say that proximity doesn’t really matter, and that wanting to keep data local is misguided and unnecessary. Unless they can overcome the laws of physics and what comprises a healthy local economy, they will always be wrong. They say that adequate is good enough, and that it doesn’t matter where your data is or who is looking after it. At Data Holdings, we think that those things matter, and hope that you do, too.
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