Dedicated Physical Servers

A data centre is a custom-designed facility for the storage of large-scale computer systems and servers, along with other information and communications technology. Whereas many small businesses choose to store their computer systems in-house, it’s important for a company to reassess as it grows its online presence as there are a number of risks associated with keeping all of your company’s data (and the data of its customers) stored at your own premises.

Firstly, regardless of how secure your premises are, they’re never going to match the security of a physical data centre. Data centres are entirely out-of-bounds for anyone who doesn’t absolutely need to be there, and any guests must always be escorted by a member of staff at all times.

Furthermore, the entire building will be under constant, 24/7 CCTV surveillance, 365 days a year – and all doors will be thoroughly guarded with advanced security systems. The most crucial areas of the building will only be possible to access using retina scanners.

With all the above security and more, data centres can guarantee that your data will be kept safely away from the hands of anyone not authorised to access it.

Whilst a physical data centre is primarily a highly secure location in which to store your company’s server and other important computer systems, it’s also much more. Other benefits of using a data centre rather than keeping your server on your own premises include the fact that data centres are highly redundant – meaning that every important system, function and resource is backed-up by multiple duplicates, so there’s no risk of the computers losing power or coming up against any other difficulties which may cause them to shut down and cause your server to crash.

Data centres also take extremely seriously the fact that having large numbers of computers constantly running in close proximity to each other can quickly lead to overheating problems. With the most advanced cooling systems available on the market and state of the art fire prevention technology, data centres can minimise the risk of overheating or fire far more effectively than business can do in-house. This is hugely significant, as even a small loss of data or a brief period of downtime can cause serious negative consequences for any business.

We strive to maintain our excellent reputation for reliability and uptime. Our secret to success is an investment in world-leading technology, ensuring the best infrastructure is deployed in a fault tolerant architecture. This includes the entire data centre operation, from power cooling and network services through to server hardware.

We continuously invest in new Dell Enterprise server technology to ensure all customers use the latest generation hardware.

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is a core feature of server hardware that ensures data integrity is distributed across more than one physical disk depending on the raid configuration. The reality is that disk failures occur. However, with RAID 1 or higher, RAID protects your data from physical drive failure without effecting the operation of the server. This allows your infrastructure to remain online.

For all servers with more than four physical drives used for production storage, we use and only recommend RAID 10, which creates a high level of performance and redundancy. For servers with two drives, we recommend RAID 1. All Micron21 services are configured with hardware RAID, as we place the highest priority on customer data.

We use Dell as our preferred supplier. Unlike many hosting companies, we do not build nor supply white label or second-hand servers. Every server is brand new with factory mission-critical warranty and support. Dell Enterprise hardware provides our customers with world-class equipment. The premium hardware has functioned seamlessly for thousands of our customers for many years. We maintain a close relationship with Dell Australia for service and support.

We maintain large amounts of Dell spare parts on-site, including:

All server hardware supplied to customers has a minimum of two power supplies and is fully monitored 24 hours a day, including a daily visual inspection. If a fault does occur, we respond proactively and fix the fault before it becomes an issue.

By standardizing to one hardware vendor, our systems operation centre (SOC) easily manages and maintains all hardware across our data centre using the Dell OMSA and DRAC (Dell Remote Access Controller) systems.

This monitoring platform alerts our SOC to handle issues with hardware before it fails, allowing us to act quickly and replace hardware before it impacts upon service.

For clients with physical dedicated hosting servers we provide customers with remote access via using DRAC Enterprise.

Customise your dedicated servers with the latest high-performing Intel E5 and E5 Xeon processors. These enable workloads to run faster and more efficiently while lowering overall cost of ownership. Configure physical servers with up to four processors to deliver high performance for diverse workloads.

Add up to 2TB of RAM during initial deployment, or increase memory capacity during the life of your server to meet your business growth. With next-generation DDR4 memory support, your overall memory bandwidth increases and is optimised for your workloads.

As you seek to harness the power of information, the demand for data-intensive and transactional workloads such as data warehousing, real-time analytics and virtualized environments is expanding. Micron21 provide enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs) that offer significant performance benefits over traditional spinning disks. This is ideal for applications requiring high random I/Os per second (IOPS) performance with low latency.

Near line SAS drives are optimal for high-capacity storage servers and provide the lowest $/GB. They are an ideal choice for non-mission critical applications with low-utilization workloads of 40% or less, such as backup devices.

SAS hard drives offer high performance, flexibility, increased reliability, greater density and scalability. They include a 12Gbps interface with 16MB of cache and rotation speed of 10K or 15K RPMs. Choose SAS drives for mission-critical workloads where reliability and high-performance speed are paramount.

Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) is a software agent that provides a comprehensive, one-to-one systems management solution in two ways: from an integrated, Web browser-based graphical user interface (GUI) and from a command line interface (CLI) through the operating system.

OMSA is designed so that Micron21 SOC system administrators can manage server systems both locally and remotely on our network. It also interfaces with Open Manage Essentials (OME) console, which allows for monitoring of systems in our data centre from a single interface.

The integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) with Lifecycle Controller is embedded within every Dell PowerEdge™ server and provides functionality that helps IT administrators deploy, update, monitor, and maintain Dell servers with no need to install additional software.

The Dell iDRAC works regardless of operating system or hypervisor presence. From a pre-OS or bare-metal state, iDRAC is ready to work because it is embedded within each server from the factory.

DRAC enables anywhere, anytime remote management, system reboots, monitoring, troubleshooting, remediation and server upgrades, independent of the OS status.

The Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) is designed to make server administrators more productive and improve the overall availability of Dell servers. iDRAC alerts administrators to server issues, helps them perform remote server management, and reduces the need for physical access to the server.

All physical dedicated servers provided by Micron21 include a DRAC access at no additional cost.

By default, each physical dedicated server at our Australian data centre comes with 2000GB of usage-based data per month. For more data, simply upgrade to one of our 95th percentile or fixed mbit data plans and enjoy massive amounts of additional capacity with your service.

With physical dedicated hardware and hosting, you enjoy the responsibility of dedicated resources. Still, these resources need to be managed correctly for the platform to work effectively and be safe and secure.

Our physical dedicated servers are offered as self-managed solutions unless a support package is purchased.