What is included in Private Cloud hosting

In detail: What is included in Private Cloud hosting

The platform is Infrastructure as a Service in FirstNet data centres in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. You consume it per vCPU, GB of RAM and GB of storage by tier, without buying or refreshing hardware:

• Compute: Dell PowerEdge clusters with Intel Xeon processors, vCPU at a 2.0 GHz baseline
• Memory: allocated in 1 GB increments and adjustable as demand changes
• Storage: Infinidat arrays with Tier 1 SSD, Tier 2 Standard and Tier 3 Archive
• Hypervisor: VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, your choice
• Resilience: high availability restarts VMs on another host, and live migration moves running VMs without downtime
• Management: the Hybr portal to provision, control and monitor your VMs and usage

What the baseline covers:

• Virtual firewall: Lite, or Enterprise, which adds unified threat management (UTM). Both control access and keep production, development and DMZ zones apart.
• Firewall support: an ongoing 8x5 support item for each firewall instance.
• Veeam backups: a backup job per virtual machine, written to immutable storage. Retention is typically 7, 14 or 30 days.
• Immutability: no one can change or delete a restore point until its retention period ends.

If you already have an approved alternative, you can leave out either one. FirstNet then writes down who is responsible for what, and your own security or recovery approach.

FirstNet always runs the data centre, hardware, virtualisation, core networking and storage. By default you manage the operating systems, applications and data inside your VMs. Optional extras include Server Management for OS monitoring and patching, in 8x5 or 24x7 tiers, chosen per VM. Another is Geographic DR to a second FirstNet data centre, with its own DR firewall. You can also add private peering to AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, site-to-site VPN, and private dedicated connectivity.

From order to live there are four steps:

• Discovery and sizing: your VM list, vCPU, RAM, storage tiers, connectivity, retention and RTO/RPO
• Solution design: firewall rules, segmentation, backup retention and, where needed, the DR runbook are documented
• Provisioning: FirstNet builds your virtual data centre in Hybr and checks it against the design
• Handover: you move to 24x7 Rapid Response support with clear contacts and escalation paths

Private Cloud protects against hardware failure inside a data centre. Losing a whole site needs Geographic DR. You own your data, and an exit with secure deprovisioning and data handover is available under your contract. FirstNet operates ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified management systems, which cover the platform.