Blaze Cloud

Blaze Cloud is a Hosted Infrastructure platform allowing you to move your server workload from on-premises or dedicated server hosting centres. Built using industry-leading components such as Lenovo Servers, Cisco Nexus Switches and Microsoft technology (like that deployed in Azure), we can provide a resilient, secure, high performance infrastructure in the UK at a very competitive price.

Why use Blaze Cloud, rather than On-Premise or Other Cloud Hosting Solutions?

1. Cost

• Benefit from Enterprise level redundancy at SME prices without the huge Capital Expenditure outlay.
• By moving your servers to the Cloud, on-premises server users can save on physical space, electricity and cooling costs.
• Only pay for only what you need and scale your infrastructure as your company grows: with Blaze Cloud you have the ability to increase CPU cores and memory to match your exact resource requirements rather than have to select pre-defined custom sizes of virtual machines where you may pay for excess CPU or memory from the likes of AWS and Azure.
• On average our customers save around 30 – 55% compared to AWS and Azure and as our billing model is simple compared to other cloud vendors, you can accurately budget without all those hidden costs.
• Dedicated server hosting centres have very little scalability.
• Blaze Cloud is also cheaper than dedicated server hosting centres which are not able to offer the levels of business continuity that Blaze Cloud provides.

2. Security

• Blaze Cloud is protected in a Data Centre that complies with ISO / IEC 27001:2005 and 27001 standards which address site security, both electronic and physical.
• Regular audits and comprehensive tests of site security are conducted, whereas physical security is often lacking on premise.
• Blaze Networks utilises Qualys to perform regular vulnerability scans to make sure the environment is secure utilising leading vendors security products such as Unified Threat Management Firewalls, offering a range of services from Antivirus, Intrusion Prevention System, Web Filtering and DDOS protection to ensure the safety of the solution. You can be assured that your data will never be replicated outside of the UK.
• Software Upgrades and Patching: We apply free upgrades to the latest Windows Server Operating System, so you benefit from the latest security and features for your workload. By ensuring it is always up to date and on a supported platform, you avoid compromising the security of the infrastructure with legacy operating systems which no longer receive security updates.

3. Flexibility

Thinking of deploying a new application on your infrastructure but don’t want to commit to any new hardware to meet the requirements in case you don’t go ahead? With Blaze Cloud we can deploy an environment for you in minutes to begin testing – and should you decide not to go ahead with it you can cancel at any time. The result: a fraction of the cost compared to purchasing on-premise or dedicated hosted server infrastructure to evaluate the product.

4. Short Term Contracts

Blaze Cloud workload is provided on a thirty-day rolling contract offering complete flexibility.

Being able to quickly meet the changing demands of your business increases the organisation’s efficiency, yielding competitive advantage. This is a cost-effective method of increasing resources temporarily over busy periods to cope with the increased load, evaluating new products, or just giving your IT staff the ability to focus on improving efficiency rather than dealing with infrastructure problems or changes.

5. Simplicity

It can be extremely difficult to calculate how much your cloud solution would cost in the likes of Azure and AWS. Their variables include: the size of virtual machine (memory / cores), the storage used, whether this is HDD or SSD, the required number of IOPS, Data transfer costs, Virtual Network costs, VPN costs, and on and on.

With Blaze Cloud we keep it simple: you pay per month £6.25 per CPU core, £12.50 per GB memory. Included in this price you get the following:

• Free Storage – for each £100 a month you spend on CPU, memory or IOPS you receive 500 GB of storage for free.
• The latest version of Windows Server Datacentre license with upgrade and downgrade rights.
• Unlimited number of users are licensed to access these servers with no need to purchase any Windows Server User CALs.
• License to use System Centre Datacentre

6. Resiliency

Blaze Cloud features enterprise level redundancy with the ability to survive multiple server failures, as well as redundancy built in throughout the network stack. It is built using Lenovo Servers (statistically the most reliable servers, achieving the 7th straight year at the top of the rankings in ITIC’s 2020 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey).

The Blaze Cloud solution offers far more resiliency than a single dedicated server: every Virtual Machine is replicated between the other hosts in the cluster in Blaze Cloud and your workloads automatically fail over to another host in the event of an issue with the physical host. With single server configurations, if your server goes offline, all your workloads go offline as well.

Optionally, further resiliency is gained by replicating the Virtual Machine to a separate Blaze Cloud cluster through BlazeVault and Veeam. We are also able to offer direct connections into Azure and AWS so you can balance your workload over multiple cloud environments for unbeatable business reliability.

In addition, because Blaze are an ISP (Internet Service Provider) we can provide national private communication links into customers locations. This enables guaranteed end to end SLAs on connectivity to your Blaze Cloud environment. Private connections provide a route for your traffic that does not travel over the public internet. Other solutions which incorporate public internet cannot provide any level of guarantee.

Finally, our datacentre has fire suppression, multiple backup power sources (including backup diesel generators), and strong physical security and access control. Overall, we offer an extremely reliable platform at a very competitive price.

7. Customer Service

Unlike other cloud providers, you can call and discuss your requirements with our experienced and qualified technicians who will be able to advise on the best solution for your specific requirements. We will take care of all the provisioning and setup of the infrastructure saving you time. We also have templated deployments that we can preconfigure for you, again reducing deployment times to minutes rather than days.

8. Low Risk

We believe that providing excellent service, rather than contractual lock-in is the best way to keep customers. We have a 30-day cancellation period for services in Blaze Cloud. You can leave quickly should you no longer need the resource or not be happy.

To find out more, please contact us.