There is a man from Bend, Kent Couch, who plans to use helium balloons to fly in a lawn chair to Montana. He is taking a risk entering the clouds, so to speak, but he has had plenty of practice flights to ensure his safety and accuracy.
Although the Vault is very much grounded in a 30,000 square foot Central Oregon facility, we too want to enter the cloud. With virtual data center technology from VMware, we will be able to exist with one foot in the cloud, offering cloud computing services, and one foot one the ground, offering co-location and disaster recovery data center services.
As you may have gleaned from our Twitter Feed @VaultDataCenter or LinkedIn, we have been quietly testing VMware’s Virtual Data Center technology over the past month.
Brock McFarlane, president of Weston Technologies, is one of the local IT professionals who volunteered to help us test our cloud services before we officially take flight.
Below is a recent Q&A session we had with McFarlane:
Q&A with Vault Cloud Services BETA Tester & IT Business Leader, Brock McFarlane
Q: How did you hear of the beta test?
A: I heard about the beta test from a post on the COISUG (Central Oregon IS Users Group) on LinkedIn.
Q: Why were you interested in participating?
A: We are already providing some cloud services to clients but have been frustrated with the level of quality and lack of support with some of the providers. We also like to work based on long term and trust built relationships, which is hard with some providers in the industry. BendBroadband Vault is local and I had seen the data center when it was first opening and was impressed with the investment they had made in our local community.
Q: What need would cloud services fill for your organization?
A: More and more of our clients are interested in having less equipment and services located in their office and spending large amounts of money to replace their IT servers. Having a Virtual Data Center platform that is local would allow us to offer clients the ability to have their IT systems located in the data center while still providing the comfort knowing the data center is local and the people involved are all part of our community. Having the data center local also opens up possibilities for more flexible network designs that help reduce the pitfalls of some remote data center solutions.
Q: What are your thoughts on the service? Who do you see benefitting the most from the service?
A: So far the service has been performing well and offers the flexibility we require to build a custom network environment for a variety of different types of clients and services that we work with. I think the initial interest will be from businesses who are looking at having to replace their existing servers and would rather pay monthly and not have to worry about the equipment being physically in their offices but want to ensure the servers are secure and reliable.
Q: Any other thoughts or feedback that we can share?
A: So far the team I am working with at BendBroadband Vault has been excellent and really listens to what is important to us. I really appreciate that!