A “Watershed” data center is a secure, centralized, heavily networked “edge” facility that can be leveraged by business organizations to host their mission critical applications within a 100-mile radius of their site.
Many businesses already see their on-site network needs outstripped by user demand. Expensive resources like engineers and designers are often unproductive due to network problems and competition for available bandwidth. The future will only see increased competition for bandwidth as application demands grow,
Engineering firms, architectural firms, manufacturers, product design firms all use storage-intensive software applications to run their business efficiently. File sizes are huge, which must be highly available and quickly downloadable. Most files are kept in-house for security and ready access, but when distributed users need the files there is often insufficient bandwidth for reliable performance.
Financial services, hospitality, communications, healthcare, retail and more, all need efficient, fast databases. Hosting that database yourself means single points of failure leading to outages and long round-trip times all of which cost money. Placing that database in the public cloud or a long distance away inhibits performance in a number of ways.
The Watershed data center conept places a specialized facility within a manageable distance of a business location. Close proximity ensures optimal performance of latency-sensitive applications such as file retrieval and database usage.
The Watershed facility is served by multiple, diverse Internet carrier feeds, which are blended to deliver guaranteed network uptime at a fraction of the cost. It is a purpose-built, physically secure, survivable building with redundant systems to guarantee application uptime. It is close enough for an in-house IT team to drive to if necessary.
We recommend a private line connection between the business site and the watershed facility, with a backup Internet feed to the site for redundancy. The private line is a secure link to between headquarters and the applications, provides an Internet feed from the data center and handles multiple other functions between the sites.
Many businesses need to remain local as possible to their employees. Their culture demands it, key personnel are local and the business is part of the local community fabric. By using a Watershed data center, businesses can keep their culture, retain their people and preserve a sense of community, all while improving the reliability, access to resources and improved productivity the future demands.
Some data center companies will say that proximity doesn’t matter, and that wanting to keep data local is misguided and unnecessary. Unless they can overcome the laws of physics they are doomed to be incorrect. As long as the speed of light governs performance due to latency for applications there will always be practical value in the Watershed data center philosophy.
About Stack41
Stack41 uses best-in-class hardware appropriate to a customer application and do not utilize single-source vendor hardware unless it is demonstrably the best alternative or a customer specifically requests its use.
Our pricing is based on a combination of three components: RAM, storage and bandwidth. This helps clients understand solution costs and formulate an accurate budget knowing there are no hidden costs.
Plus – we’re smart, reliable, honest people. You’ll like working with us. We’ll do a great job. And you can rest assured that your business is in good hands.