UUNET is gearing up for what it sees as a growing trend in Web hosting: the collocation of Web servers at data centers. The intention is to offer customers quicker bandwidth upgrades, redundancy and other hosting services that are expensive for businesses to build and maintain themselves.
Customers looking to free up space at their offices by moving their servers elsewhere, while at the same time eliminating the "last mile" connection to their networks, are beginning to take advantage of UUNET's collocation offering, company officials say.
So far hundreds of companies have collocated their servers at UUNET centers where they become "embedded" in UUNET's infrastructure, making if "very easy for UUNET to crank up the knob" if any of those customers suddenly need more bandwidth, says Paul Lambert, vice president of Internet data centers at UUNET.
The typical collocation customer has high-traffic sites and is already in the market to lease T-1 or even OC3 lines, UUNET officials say. Companies that have bought the service have introduced as many as 20 servers handling a variety of duties, from electronic commerce transactions to chat.
UUNET typically can add a T-1 line within 48 hours for collocation customers, says Mitch Ferrow, director of product management for UUNET's Web hosting services. That compares with weeks or even months of waiting for a local exchange carrier to provide the line, he says.
The centers also provide built-in network redundancy, which ensures the servers will remain up even if there's an outage on one connection. Collocating also saves customers money by enabling them to share air conditioning, generator and other maintenance costs, Ferrow says.
Systems managers use a virtual console to get real time access to information on bandwidth usage and statistics on how hard the processor, hard drive and other key parts of the server are working, Lambert says. They also can use the management features to set alarms that tell them when things are running near capacity, giving them time to take evasive action.
Nine data centers, including six in Europe, already are online, with another seven, all in the U.S., under construction, Lambert says. The existing U.S. data centers are located in Columbus, Ohio; Washington and San Jose. The six European cities where the UUNET facilities have opened are Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, London, Frankfurt and Dortmund, Germany.
UUNET, a subsidiary of MCI Worldcom, last summer announced it would spend $100 million to build the seven new data centers now under construction in the U.S. The centers will be in Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Westchester City, N.Y. and Carteret, N.J. The centers offer outsourced Web hosting services as well as collocating services.
Companies that move their Web servers to a UUNET site manage and monitor the equipment remotely, but Jeff Sturgeon, vice president of marketing, says that this aspect of the service appeals to some companies because it means they don't have to change their business model.
UUNET is integrating the dial access network built on Ascend equipment with two other networks based on 3Com equipment in the U.S., says Carl Showalter, vice president of dial and broadband services. The integrated network ultimately will support up to 100 million end users, up to 10 million modems and a variety of services, including virtual private networks and integrated broadband.
Digital subscriber line (DSL) is another business area that UUNET began approaching aggressively this year, Sturgeon says. UUNET offers DSL in 12 major markets, and officials say that the company will announce expansions soon.
Mark Spagnolo, president and CEO of UUNET, says the company is pushing local exchange carriers to implement DSL.
"We need stuff deployed so fast on DSL to make it successful," Spagnolo says.
UUNET will have to garner a rapidly growing customer base in order to make DSL worthwhile. The company is working on being able to accommodate this customer base by automating the process of accessing the network, Spagnolo says.
Company officials also stressed that UUNET is not interested in entering the application service provider business, but is interested in supplying that growing market.
"We want to sell infrastructure to all of them," Spagnolo says.
UUNET, in Fairfax, Va., can be reached at 703-206-5600 or at http://www.uunet.com
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