ServerTweak choses Levanta Intrepid

I recently had a chance to communicate with Ivan Gonzalez of ServerTweak, LLC, a hosting company that's using software from Levanta. ServerTweak offers services in the following cities:

• California: Fremont, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto
• Georgia: Atlanta
• Illinois: Chicago
• New York: New York City
• Texas: Dallas
• Virginia: Ashburn
• Washington: Seattle

I thought you'd be interested in what I learned.

Who are you and would you please describe your organization?

ServerTweak Networks, LLC is a provider of dedicated servers, colocation, and IP transit. We offer our premium, high speed, all fiber network to our clients in 15 different locations across the country. We consider ourselves a pioneer in the this industry because we are utilizing the newest technology available to us to manage our network.

What are you doing that needs this technology from Levanta?

Currently, we manage over 500 dedicated servers in at least 2 different locations. Our main headquarters is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. To keep overhead low, we must be able to manage our network remotely.

What did you consider before you selected Lavanta's technology?

We considered opening offices in each location, and having our network administrators travel to different locations as needed.

Why did you select this technology?

Levanta is the only appliance that allows us to monitor our network; rollback or deploy resources, applications, and services; migrate entire systems; and restore unrecoverable systems in the matter of minutes without having the need to be physically present. We have overcome the need for hard drives! All of our servers are now driveless, which also keeps the cost of power down.

What tangible benefits has your organization gotten from the use of this technology?

Our clients have seen the most benefits from this application. We can now offer fully managed solutions to those clients that require this kind of support. Levanta allows our clients rapid recovery from errors, immediate migrations from one physical server to another, and the peace of mind knowing that their information is safely stored on a RAID system.

What advice would you offer to others facing similar issues?

Definitely explore all options, making sure your decision is an educated one. It took a while for us to actually make our decision to partner with Levanta, all I can say is we could have used this sooner!

Who is Levanta?

Levanta supplies the Intrepid family of management appliances for both physical and virtual resources. Here's how they describe their capabilities.

Levanta data center automation consists of three core capabilities:

• Monitoring agents to measure changing conditions in your Linux system environment.
• Configurable rules engine that allows you to create policies that define monitoring thresholds and the automated actions that should be taken if conditions are met.
• Policy-driven automation to rollback or deploy resources, applications, and services where you need them, when you need them. To do you much good, it must be fast. And Levanta is very fast.

Their catch phrase is “Levanta Data Center Automation: Deploy, Monitor, Analyze.”

Summary

If one considers where the most significant costs are in an IT-based solution, one quickly learns that hardware and software are often a minor portion of the overall costs. The most significant costs center on the staff-related costs of installation, updating, administration, operations, training and the like. It appears that Levanta is targeting some of those costs.