GlobalCenter To Roll Out Four Hosted Services

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December 10, 1999 (11:20 AM EST)

GlobalCenter To Roll Out Four Hosted Services

By Chuck Moozakis,

Midsize and large businesses with high-volume e-commerce sites are the target of four hosted services to be unveiled next week by GlobalCenter.

All four services -- content delivery, tape storage backup, performance management, and a forthcoming disk storage service -- will be hosted at GlobalCenter's six data centers and delivered over IP or other network links to customers on an as-needed basis, said Matt Parnell, vice president of product management at GlobalCenter, an arm of carrier Global Crossing.

• Using Akamai Technologies' distributed caching platform, GlobalCenter will be able to quickly route cached content across other Akamai-equipped backbones. Web content is pushed to users from the nearest Akamai server -- the company has more than 900 servers on 25 major networks -- thus accelerating delivery. The service costs $2,000 for each megabyte of data transmitted.

• The tape-on-demand service is aimed at enterprises that need to back up and recover large amounts of data. Businesses can store up to 300 gigabytes of data per month and can schedule both weekly and daily backups. The service is priced at 2 cents to 3 cents per megabyte.

A companion Fibre Channel disk-on-demand storage service, for data that must be accessed more quickly, will be available next year. This service, based on EMC RAID arrays, will whisk data from data centers to customers at up to 100 megabytes per second over GlobalCenter's fiber backbone. It will be priced at 3 cents per megabyte.

• GlobalCenter's performance monitoring service, based on Keynote Systems' Perspective application, gives enterprises Web reports on the performance of their e-commerce sites, measuring latency, packet loss, network availability, and other elements. In February, the service provider will enhance the website with GUI system performance. Performance monitoring will be offered at no charge.

Motley Fool is evaluating the disk-on-demand offering to determine if outsourcing will help trim the financial site's soaring data storage costs.

"We see the volume of storage we need growing dramatically, and we need something that's expandable," said Dwight Gibbs, chief technologist at Motley Fool. "So far, it looks pretty compelling."

"We're going to see more and more services like storage to permit businesses to get access to expensive systems without having to buy extra equipment to handle additional data loads," said George Peabody, Aberdeen Group analyst.

GlobalCenter is also bolstering its professional services unit, focusing on network design and security. It said it plans to staff each of its data centers with a dedicated staff providing enterprises with security and authentication products. GlobalCenter is planning to build an additional 11 data centers to supplement its existing six facilities over the next year.