CSC is a respected name in outsourcing and has been quietly delivering managed Web hosting services to Fortune 1,000 customers since before business "discovered" the Web. The organization's solution for Romao typifies a dedicated hosting model, and CSC has gone to great lengths to ensure that its service quality remains high, even as the number of customers assigned to its facilities increases. In the manner of a good consultant, however, CSC appears reluctant to disagree with the customer. As a result, many of the vendor's responses to key questions come across as waffling or indecisive.
CSC proposes a phased deployment of multisite implementations. CSC would first deploy Romao Vineyards' Web site to its Newark, Del., data center. This strategy would enable the customer to "re-evaluate application performance of a single-site implementation (key driver behind a multisite decision)." The single-site implementation costs less to maintain, CSC adds.
Such a strategy also gives CSC time to complete its fourth hosting center, in San Diego, expected by late this year. The company's other data centers are in Copenhagen, Denmark and Sydney, Australia.
CSC's real-time data replication solution is based on Hitachi Data Systems' storage WAN technology, but like its outsourcing peers, the company won't commit to a master/master database synchronization solution using functionality offered by Oracle.
The vendor pitches the same basic hardware solution and a comparable networking solution as that of its competitors. One unique feature is the use of an optional shared Oracle database that distributes hardware and software costs over several customers. CSC promises a price reduction for participating in this shared environment. However, we don't believe CSC should pitch a shared infrastructure strategy unless the customer balks over the price of a dedicated platform. Romao demands security, integrity and service-level adherence, all of which suggest a reluctance to embrace a shared infrastructure strategy. Since Romao wants a best-of-breed solution, CSC's offer of a discount alternative makes little sense -- except as a vehicle for CSC to reduce its own operating costs.
CSC also waffles on security and management consoles, stating that the vendor prefers to manage security as a shared infrastructure element of its solution. However, CSC concedes, "in situations where customers insist on performing these functions in-house, a dedicated custom network environment can be deployed so that enhanced levels of access can be provided."
The vendor says "no" to direct customer access to its managed service environment but adds, somewhat confusingly, that it has "no objections to data being provided on a real-time basis for Romao Vineyards' use." The vendor also approves the use of an SLA monitoring service, provided the activity would "comply with CSC's security policies and not affect performance."
Single-site implementation would require three to four weeks and optionally include a range of services, including application load and stress testing. CSC offers an SLA guaranteeing 99.7 percent server availability and 99.97 percent network availability. The setup fee for a single data-center solution would cost $50,000 to $65,000 with monthly service charges of about $30,000 (about $1.1 million over three years). The second implementation would cost about $40,000 in start-up fees and the same amount in monthly service fees (or $2.3 million). The shared Oracle database would cut the monthly fee by about $5,000.
CSC's language is vague and pushes the vendor's "flexibility" into the realm of "anything for a contract."
Global Web and Application Hosting Services, Computer Sciences Corp., (866) 220-8434, (310) 615-0311; fax (310) 640-2648. www.csc.com or GWH-Americas@csc.com
e^deltacom
E^deltacom is still working its way out of the collocation model and into the managed Web-hosting model. We think the company will be a formidable player armed with an impressive set of facility and network resources.
The vendor proposes to provision Romao's platform as it would any collocation account, in its Suwanee, Ga., data center. For a redundant site, the company identifies three other locations, in Atlanta, Ocala, Fla., and Dallas; alternatively, Romao can be hosted at any domestic or international gateway managed by Level 3 Communications, a partner. To provide the back-end connections to Romao offices, e^deltacom offers a sketchy plan in which it would provision a WAN circuit for the correlated amount of traffic.
The response is less a proposal than a brochure about its data-center facility in Suwanee and the 10-state SONET-based fiber network of its parent company (ITC^Deltacom). E^deltacom has just entered the managed hosting business through the acquisition of Bay Data Consultants.
Pricing of the solution is filled with variable options; we can't even guess at a total. Costs include $712.50 per month for a cabinet (an enclosed rack) and about $950 to $1,250 per month in bandwidth charges. Since the RFI does not specify how much storage would be required, the company posts a variety of daily and weekly backup charges of $6 to $26 per GB. Host setup charges are estimated at $400 per host, and managed firewall services produce monthly charges of $500 for a single firewall to $3,000 for high-availability configurations. Other monthly charges of $2,000 to $6,000 are specified for Oracle database administration services.
e^deltacom, a division of ITC^Deltacom, (866) 600-3266, (678) 835-5000; fax (678) 835-3264. www.edeltacom.com or sales@edeltacom.com
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