It’s All in the Technical Sauce

Swift Systems has a secret technical recipe for bandwidth, and without giving away the exact recipe, I’ll explain the sauce ingredients and how we are able to guarantee port speed and service at fixed rates compared to other IT managed service providers.

Many data centers desire to control the amount of bandwidth delivered to each customer, because this dribble is not easy to manage, they sign their customers up for variable billing plans and simply monitor the usage. Compared to the capabilities that modern equipment offers, this is a failure of the marketplace to deliver the best solutions.

Most data centers sell their customers a port speed subscription as part of a data center services agreement, such as a “50 Megabit port speed”, or a fixed amount of “transfer”, such as (500GB Transfer). This represents the amount of data that may enter or exit the system through that connection. The service is then dished out to customers through a pipe (Gigabit Ethernet) that is set to “wide open”. These service providers typically include small print contract language about “burst rates”, or 95th percentile billing, which means that they connect to a port offering 10 to several 100 times the bandwidth or transfer subscription, guaranteeing overflow usage and charges. In other words, “good luck staying within that constraint, and we will be monitoring your usage, and ready to bill when you go over”. The billing rates for this spillage is often far more than the service agreed-upon, sometimes 10 to 20 times the planned expense.

For most data center customers this is tantamount to handing a 2 year old child a heavy laden filled to the brim pitcher of Kool-Aid with the lid off and saying, “your first cup is free, but each additional cup is $5.00”. Or, you could compare this to the cell phone of late 80’s and early 90’s. You could get a cell phone for $35 a month, with a 20 minute per month plan, with a 1 minute minimum per call and a network that dropped most of your calls if your car moved. The actual invoice ran from $100 to $1000 dollars for the early adopters. Data center providers are still getting away with this because customers still don’t realize there is a fixed price option – largely because many of the providers simply can’t or won’t deliver.

Swift Systems’ technical recipe offers fixed price bandwidth options by employing per-port bandwidth management with high-end Cisco switches. This innovative implementation distills the solution and allows us to pass predictable costs and savings to our customers through a simple systems architectural design. With no risk of ‘surprise billing’ our customers are able to increase subscribed speeds within minutes, with a simple request to our support staff.

Let our Specialists take care of your IT Support