Month: March 2018

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West 7 Center Ready to Enable International Connectivity in Growing Asian Markets

Los Angeles – March 29, 2018 – Rising Realty Partners (Rising), a full-service investment platform specializing in creating world-class commercial and industrial properties, announces that its West 7 Center is strategically positioned to support carriers, OTTs, and enterprises looking to expand into growing Asian markets. With over 16 global and domestic carriers on-site and 172,000 square feet of space available, the Tier III facility offers prospective clients an attractive and reliable gateway to Asia.

Experts predict that, by 2019, the Asia-Pacific region will generate the most web traffic in the world – double the volume generated in North America. As a result, data centers like West 7 Center will serve a critical role as reliable colocation partners, providing mission-critical infrastructure and support for the flow of data from the US across the Pacific Ocean.

“As Los Angeles’ largest purpose-built data center, West 7 Center is perfectly situated as an Asian gateway,” says Tyson Strutzenberg, Chief Operating Officer of Rising Realty Partners. “With direct access to One Wilshire, a primary transit center for internet traffic from the US to Asia, we offer the redundancy our customers need for their data and mission-critical applications. Backed by two central plants with N+1 redundancy and 70,000 gallons of fuel, West 7 Center can provide ongoing uptime in case of emergency or power outages.”

“When we were looking to add to our presence in Los Angeles, we specifically chose West 7 Center because of their round-the-clock security and engineering services,” says Arman Khalili, CEO of Evocative, which recently signed a 42,000 square foot lease in the facility.

“Our clients include small start-ups and Fortune 500 companies – each in need of a high level of flexibility, service and low latency connectivity. This is one of the best data centers from an infrastructure perspective and it rivals some of the major carrier hotels and disaster recovery sites on a global scale. We are confident that our customers will benefit from West 7 Center’s capabilities as a data storage and colocation facility with easy access to subsea cables that travel to Asia.”

West 7 Center is a Tier III Datacenter Facility

West 7 Center is a Tier III datacenter facility built with mission critical infrastructure, 24/7 on-site engineering and security support in the heart of Los Angeles. The facility has nine (9) floors of office space and 340,000 RSF of datacenter space on three (3) subterranean levels that are supported by the Building’s two (2) central plants with a total of 16.9 MW of generator backed power, 3,000 kW of Building UPS power and 9,000 tons of cooling capacity for telecom, mission critical, co-location and datacenter operations.

Currently, West 7 Center has approximately 13 MW of emergency power and 172,000 sq ft of space available. The building has undergone significant upgrades in order to keep up with the ever-changing technology environment. Learn more about West 7 Center’s infrastructure and services.

Rising Realty Partners

Rising Realty Partners is a full-service investment and operating platform specializing in creating world-class commercial and industrial properties. With over 3M SF under management, Rising approaches real estate investing and operating by focusing on three fundamental areas of impact that have proven to create value: environmental, technological, and social.

Rising’s team of entrepreneurial, innovative facilitators has a depth of understanding and surpassed track record in identifying prime investment opportunities. Please visit risingrp.com for more information.

About Evocative

Evocative it a North American company and an owner and operator of secure, compliant, highly available data centers. We are the trusted guardians of our clients’ Internet infrastructure. To tour an Evocative data center or receive additional information on data center services.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Are Not the Same: What You Need to Know

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Are Not the Same: What You Need to Know

What is Business Continuity? Business continuity or business continuity planning is the way in which a company maintains the operations of their business in the event of the loss of resources during a small outage or complete disaster. Whether the outage lasts for two hours or six days, it has the potential to be equally devastating. It includes preventative measures that are put in place company-wide and regulates a variety of controls. Ask yourself, how will our company continue to function if an outage occurs for any reason? What location will we work from and how will our employees be able to access the materials and information they need to continue to do their jobs? How will we continue to sell products and services to our customers? How will we continue to support them? Business continuity is about mitigating risk before anything ever happens.

Best Practices for Developing an Effective Business Continuity Plan

Best practices for developing an effective business continuity plan include:

  • Form a team, including employees from various departments, to develop a living business continuity plan.
  • Obtain buy in from your executive management team to ensure this is a priority for the company.
  • Be proactive in identifying risks and watch for new, potential risks on a regular basis.
  • Understand how those risks will affect your day to day business operations, as well as specific groups including employees and customers.
  • Put measures in place to mitigate those risks.
  • Identify people and procedures needed to alert employees, customers, vendors, and other key stakeholders that a disaster has occurred.
  • Regularly test your procedures to ensure they can be implemented efficiently, effectively and quickly.
  • Examine your plan quarterly or at an interval determined by your team to review the procedures and ensure they are still current.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is one critical component of the larger business continuity plan. Although it is not solely focused on IT, it is often the IT department that takes over responsibility. It becomes your backup and recovery plan—the way in which you will maintain, store, and restore your data, files, software applications, servers, and other equipment so that you are up and running again in the shortest amount of time. Ask yourself, how frequently do we currently backup our data and can the company function without critical data for any period of time? Are additional servers and other equipment readily available to us to quickly rebuild our network infrastructure? Is there another secure location within a reasonable distance of our office where we could restore our network if the current server closet or server room is no longer usable? If business continuity is about mitigating risk before anything ever happens, disaster recovery is about quickly and efficiently implementing your plans during and after the disaster has occurred.

Best Practices for Developing an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

Best practices for developing an effective disaster recovery plan include:

  • Understand what impact the previously identified risks could have on your IT assets.
  • Decide how you will replace equipment if that should be necessary.
  • Know how many additional servers and other pieces of equipment you have in stock which could be installed immediately after the outage.
  • Implement a procedure for obtaining any new parts which you may not have in stock.
  • Identify the level and type of support/notifications you will provide to employees, customers, vendors and others during the outage. For example, a help desk, call tree, automated push notifications or conference bridges.
  • Determine your Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The target time you need to recover your IT and business activities after a disaster has struck. Knowing how quickly you can actually recover your IT infrastructure and how quickly the business needs to recover to prevent catastrophic loss, will help you decide on the preparations you need to put in place to make sure that those two numbers are in sync.
  • Determine your Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The window of time in which data loss is acceptable for your company. Put simply, it is the amount of time between required data backups. Could your company still operate, virtually unaffected, if you were unable to access the last three days of data? If not, you may want to consider daily backups or even real-time backup.
  • Decide on your recovery failover procedures and system restart procedures.
  • Preselect a local data center provider whose colocation or cloud services you would be able to utilize in the event that your facility is no longer usable or accessible to ensure that rapid restoration of business operations is possible.

The Key Takeaway

Many companies choose not to proactively prepare for a disaster because they believe that it will never happen to them. If they are not located in a region prone to floods, hurricanes, tornados or blizzards, they do not believe it is necessary to expend the time, resources and money to not only implement but also maintain and test a plan. Remember, a disaster can come in many different forms, not just environmental. IT hardware failures, cyber-attacks, terrorist attacks and even vandalism or simple human error can cause extensive outages over extended periods of time. Correctly defining disaster recovery and business continuity planning, understanding the specific differences of each, proactively implementing a custom plan to meet your requirements and continually testing and reevaluating your plan will help keep your business in business for many years to come

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Evocative President & COO Derek Garnier to Speak at Phoenix Datacenters

Garnier and other panel members will discuss the state of the data center market.

Evocative President and COO Derek Garnier will speak at Phoenix Datacenters: Communication, Infrastructure and Innovation

Communication, Infrastructure & Innovation Derek Garnier is the President & COO of Evocative and brings with him 29 years of provider experience in the datacenter, network, and compute. Prior to joining Evocative, he served as CEO of Layer42 Networks, which was acquired by Wave Broadband in 2015, with Garnier assuming the position of SVP Data Center Services for Wave. He has held both management and engineering roles at many top internet infrastructure providers including QTS Datacenters, United Layer, AboveNet Communications, SiteSmith, Global Crossing, Global Center, MFS Datanet, and Cabletron Systems. Garnier frequently moderates industry panels, speaks at both industry events and on radio and provides consult for investors and companies during M&A processes.

WHAT: Leading the Curve: The State of the Data Center Market Garnier will join other leading data center developers who are expanding in Phoenix. The panel will discuss how Phoenix is uniquely well-positioned to meet demand from sectors such as technology, banking, financial services, healthcare, retail and e-commerce in 2018.

WHERE: The Camby – 2401 East Camelback Road, Phoenix, AZ 85016

WHEN: March 28, 2018, from 7:30 am – 11:00 am Register for Phoenix Data Centers: Communication, Infrastructure & Innovation For more information on Evocative’s suite of data center services or to take a tour of one of the company’s data centers, please visit http://www.evocative.com. About Evocative Evocative are a North American company and an owner and operator of secure, compliant, highly available data centers. We are the trusted guardians of our clients’ Internet infrastructure
Benefits of Carrier Neutral Colocation Data Centers

Benefits of Carrier Neutral Colocation Data Centers

What is a Carrier Neutral Data Center?

A carrier-neutral data center (sometimes called a network-neutral data center) refers to an independent data center that does not have an affiliation with one specific ISP or network provider. This contrasts with a carrier-specific data center which offers only a single carrier that must be used by all clients. A carrier-neutral data center welcomes multiple carriers and enables them to provide their own internet services from the one facility.

The data center may offer their clients a direct connection to network providers like AT&T, CenturyLink, Cogent Communications, Level3 Communications, Paxio, Verizon, XO Communications, Zayo Group, and many others. The data center does not specifically direct their clients to choose one carrier over the others. Colocation clients can review the services offered by each and are free to select the right carrier and network for their specific needs.

Carrier Neutral Data Center Benefits

Why is a carrier-neutral data center so valuable? It provides significant benefits including increased reliability and redundancy, flexibility, constancy, and a lower cost of ownership.

Data Center Provides Reliability / Redundancy

In today’s always-on, always available business environment, no amount of downtime is acceptable. That’s where data center redundancy comes in. When you think of a redundant data center, things like backup power when the electricity goes out and backup equipment in the event of a hardware failure come to mind. However, we also refer to redundancy when talking about carrier neutrality.

Carrier-neutral redundancy means that a data center does not have only one carrier with a single point of connectivity but multiple ISPs to prevent any potential downtime.

Should an outage occur with one carrier, another carrier in the same data center can take over immediately without you ever knowing that anything happened. This is a key benefit of carrier neutrality and one of the ways in which a data center can guarantee a 100% uptime availability over many years.

Data Center Offers Flexibility

Not only does a carrier-neutral data center offer a variety of network providers but each provider has unique capabilities. When implementing your colocation plans, you may select one carrier based on their availability, cost, or other features which help you meet your immediate business goals. However, as your business grows and needs change, your technology requirements may change as well, requiring you to reevaluate your current carrier and select a new carrier-based on future goals.

Data Centers Offer Constancy / Stability

Choosing the right colocation data center requires a comprehensive review of their facility, infrastructure, personnel, security, certifications, SLAs and expansion capabilities. Over time, certification requirements, government regulations, staff, or business processes could change. This may significantly impact the ability of a carrier-specific data center run by a single telecommunications carrier to conduct business and consistently provide the high level of service and support you require.

A carrier-neutral data center sets you up for future success from the start. Should the ISP you have selected be unable to keep up with new requirements or significantly increases its prices, you can leave your equipment exactly where it is and simply change carriers within the same data center. There is no need to spend time, resources and money to move your servers and other equipment to a completely new facility.

Lower Cost of Ownership

Every business knows that competition inevitably drives down prices. The same is true for a data center with multiple network carriers. You save money by easily switching to a different carrier if they raise their prices.

But, did you consider the additional cost you will incur – both in terms of money and downtime – to move all your IT equipment out of one data center and into another data center because you have outgrown your current network carrier?

This cost can be significant and should not be overlooked.

When considering if a specific data center will be able to support you today and well into the future, including the requirement that it is carrier neutral should be a key element in your selection process. Evocative is a national owner and operator of highly secure, carrier-neutral colocation data centers across the United States. Our data centers offer you the flexibility your business needs and the 100% uptime availability you demand. Every Evocative high availability data center meets the rigorous security and protocol standards of HIPAA, PCI DSS, SSAE-16, SSAE-18, SOC 2 and ISAE 3402.

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