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Operates data centers and provides data center solutions and services.
Year Established: | |
Funding: | |
Address: | Plano, TX 75093 |
Telephone: | |
Mobile: | |
Fax: | |
Mail: | info@horizondcs.com |
Company URL: | http://www.horizondcs.com |
Our Mission: We deliver access to audit-friendly, secure, enterprise level technology infrastructure and services, in the most customized, flexibile manner possible to facilitate delivery of IT services to our customers and their customers.
A Vision for A Different Sort of IT Provider
Horizon Data Center Solutions and its subsidiaries have been providing managed services, hosting and co-location since 2000. The company began providing services to Dallas based customers out of a single data center location and quickly grew to providing full IT outsourcing and hosting services to clients across the US and internationally.
All along, Horizon has held firm to the concept of making IT easy for its customers, of providing excellent technical solutions and extreme customer service. We look deep and wide to understand not just the specific technical requirements of our customers, but also the real impact that enterprise quality IT delivery has on organizations of all sizes. Whether its a large primary colocation deployment, a single cabinet for disaster recovery, appllication and email hosting and cloud IAAS, or help desk support...our desire to serve people, not technnology, drives what we do.
Our Strengths
For Immediate Release
Tier 1 Research: AboveNet A Feather In the Cap
Wednesday September 02 2009
By Jason Schafer Tier1 Research
T1R recently covered Horizon Data Center Solutions filling of its first facility in Dallas and its additional expansion plans. While it is expanding its facility footprint Horizon is also concentrating efforts on expanding its network offering at its sites understanding the importance of carrier density and diversity for customers.
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AboveNet has completed a private ring connecting Horizons two Dallas datacenters. AboveNets presence and the addition of more carriers in general has benefits all around in the way of route diversity redundancy and scalable gigabit-level bandwidth for Horizon and its customers.
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It is no longer acceptable to most datacenter tenants to be offered one or two carrier networks ââ¬â carrier density is of utmost importance which is largely why datacenters arent found in remote locations where land and/or power are abundant or cheap. Whats the minimum in terms of an acceptable number of available carriers? This is largely dependent on the type of customer and geographical location but we put the average at around five.
T1R take
The presence of AboveNet in Horizons datacenters is another feather in the cap of both companies and there is sure to be synergy. Abundant networks in Horizons datacenters will make its services more appealing to customers and more customers will drive bandwidth usage for the carriers that are present. More competition between carriers generally tends to drive network costs down though the cost for interconnects can offset the cost from carriers.
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T1R thinks that datacenter providers need to provide network density and availability at their facilities in addition to geographical location power availability and infrastructure availability/redundancy level. As SaaS cloud and wide area virtualization deployments become more mainstream the network side of the datacenter bubbles closer to the top. Just knowing how many carriers are available in a facility is a start (very few providers publicly share this information on their websites) but datacenter providers should also name the carriers. Finally the type of connectivity must be specified ââ¬â is there dark fiber in the facility is there optical transmission gear is there an IP point-of-presence? These are increasingly important data points for customers at the start of RPF processes rather than their conclusions.
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For Immediate Release
Tier1 Research: Is Cloud the New Colo?
Monday January 01 1900
Antonio Piraino Tier1 Research
Dallas-based Horizon Data Center Solutions more commonly known for its colocation business has taken the leap into the cloud space launching its FlexSafe Cloud service. Perhaps leap is too large a word for a company that has been upping its managed services ever since the acquisition of Mareechi ââ¬â an ASP ââ¬â in April. T1R has seen colocation companies add managed services partly as an answer to increased demand from enterprises but also to increase ARPU with services on top of straight colocation generating more revenue per cabinet. But very few have managed the transition putting Horizons FlexSafe in the company of services like those offered form StrataScale or even Terremark Carpathia Hosting and Savvis enterprise cloud divisions. The difference for Horizon is that it is targeting the mid-sized enterprise and federal sector that has traditionally looked to spend millions of dollars on colocation outfits and are now expected to be sucked in by Horizons ability to create customized solutions to these complex environments.
Positioning
Horizon intends to position itself somewhere between the colocation providers the managed hosters and the large managed outsourcing providers like CSC and IBM. It wont be as expensive nor as complete as the latter but the firm believes that it has the professional services unit and complex management expertise in-house that many of the cookie-cutter hosters lack. It also believes that its colocation business will help it succeed in the cloud space for a number of reasons. Take for example the fact that the company is launching the cloud from one of its Dallas datacenters that is being leased on a wholesale basis from Digital Realty Trust which permits for rapid expansion for its colocation and cloud business with less substantial capex requirements than other builders of the cloud. The company also has recently established a strong relationship with AboveNet for a private ring connecting both of its Dallas datacenters. AboveNets presence and the addition of more carriers in general has benefits all around in the way of route diversity redundancy and scalable gigabit-level bandwidth for Horizon and its customers.
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Is that enough to make a colocation provider a cloud provider? No. The company has clearly spent some money on hardware from Hewlett-Packard in the form of blade servers and ESX licenses from VMware for virtualizing the entire cloud environment. 3PAR is the company entrusted to deliver the SAN storage for the cloud with its virtual domain capability. Ciscos firewalling (and other IDS security practices to make FlexSafe feel safe) and F5 Networks load balancers complete the infrastructure mix allowing for very granular load balancing redundancy and high availability based on physical and virtual infrastructure. Horizon currently has two Dallas-Ft. Worth area data centers connected by the aforementioned private fiber ring providing fast reliable data backup and replication solutions. And this is what Horizon believes will give it the foundation to go after the federal sector and mid-tier enterprises that require a great deal of utility storage computing power and networking bandwidth ââ¬â at a cost that would be unappealing to the average SMB customer.
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So what makes this infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering any different from the others? The in-house expertise brought by Mareechi and Horizon. The company has supported complex hybrid ecosystems and has deployed and managed SAGE product line applications and other CRM ERP and SQL deployments. The company doesnt want to become an IBM or EDS but it also doesnt want to offer a public cloud facility for credit card-holding ISVs. It believes that its cloud product will really be a series of virtual private clouds for its mid-tier (i.e. $300 to 500m) clientele that requires bespoke systems with customized SLAs ââ¬â that currently revolve around high availability (using physical and virtual technologies to do so).
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The Horizon FlexSafe Cloud is processor based ââ¬â with multiple-sized processors being the initial option and not fixed menus available through a Web portal. Scalability is not truly automated and orchestration is still relatively manual. The company will monitor workloads each of which can have built in utilization thresholds that trigger alerts for making scale up or down decisions. The company feels that the nature of its clientele is such that they will make these decisions together with Horizon just as they would around the addition of a new cabinet or power unit in the colocation environment. Those alarms will be set around hard disks processors memory and network utilization. Although bandwidth is a separate purchase for VPN purposes between off-premise locations and the Dallas datacenters ââ¬â DR can be controlled and internal VPNs are controlled by Horizon. In addition depending on the contract the company will fire up a new image if necessary on behalf of customer.
So is this a cloud?
Horizon wisely stays away from trying to prove just how cloudy its IaaS service is. Yes it has some elements that T1R considers necessary to be a cloud including some level of automation management security and storage. No it does not speak to APIs nor fancy Web interfaces and automated levels of initial deployment or even multi-tenancy. Yet it has the ability to scale up and down and there is a large amount of automated workflow and things are virtualized and dynamically changeable. More importantly Horizon has shrewdly defined itself by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) working definition with its key characteristics of on-demand self-service ubiquitous network access ability to rapidly scale resources and pay on a measured-usage basis. The relevance to this is that NIST has been instrumental in giving the government a foundation by which to have a universal definition of the way in which it looks at technologies making the federal sector feel comfortable enough to embrace it. It includes security compliance measures and other technical guidance using language that is fast becoming commonplace across the federal sector. Incidentally the working definition of cloud computing is now is in version 15.
T1R take
When Terremark launched its Enterprise service in Europe Joost Metten referred to it tongue in cheek as colo 2.0. The reason being as colocation became increasingly expensive on the continent and certain enterprises continued to hold off on its premium cousin ââ¬â the fully managed service so cloud services introduced a kind of capex to opex solution similar to dedicated hosting with less of a commitment and a greater number of features. Interestingly Horizon has seen its new cloud services being used as part of a migration strategy by its colocation customers. The service has not been around long enough to find out whether it has stickiness with these deployments but the hope is that as these enterprises continue making use of the networking and virtualization capabilities eventually they will retain full production environments on that cloud infrastructure. Plus the typical colocation company that Horizon goes after is more concerned with compliance and scalability than true variability and spikiness of traffic ââ¬â meaning the cloud revenue could become quite substantial at the level of deployment of these customers.
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But Horizon makes mention of the fact that rarely do its colocation customers eventually not make use of its professional services or fully managed services. That means that high-touch services are sought after and the premiums are there to be had from low-hanging fruit. In some ways this contradicts the need for self-managed cloud services like FlexSafe. Or so it seems. And herein lies one of the differences between the enterprise-focused cloud service and the commoditized public cloud services ââ¬â that enterprise cloud is really a continuation of a very complex environment that may contain any quantity of on-premise self managed infrastructure colocation managed hosting and IaaS services ââ¬â a combination of high-touch and low-touch services. T1R expects to see greater evolution of these kinds of hybrid environments with SLAs becoming increasingly granular and helping to shape the index of pricing associated with each service and performance guarantee.
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For Immediate Release
Tier 1 Research: Horizon Buys Mareechi
Monday January 01 1900
Jeff Pascke Tier 1 Reseaerch
Dallas-based Horizon Data Center Solutions is expanding its service offerings with the acquisition of privately owned Mareechi. Dallas-based Mareechi is an application service provider (ASP) who provides managed services to more than 100 customers. Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed but the combined company has projected revenues of over $20m for 2009.
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Horizon provides datacenter colocation services from space leased from Digital Realty Trust in two datacenter facilities in Dallas. Horizon currently has a footprint of 37000 square feet of datacenter space. Horizon added its second facility in Dallas at 2240 Marsh in December which T1R has written about previously. Horizon started offering colocation services in mid-2008 and is planning to have four datacenters by mid-2009. Horizon is adding a datacenter facility in Houston and an additional facility in Dallas which are both planned to open in Q2. Horizon is also planning to expand to Virginia in Q3.
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Horizon has been looking to add a managed services division as part of its operations. The firm ha
Ballast Point Venture Partners
Lance A. Smith, President & CEO. Lance is the former North American Data Center Operations leader from Atos Origin, an international IT outsourcing firm. Lance is responsible for the operations at HDCS and is the architect for HDCS ITIL/ISO-based process. Lance is published and a speaker at various industry events.
Chuck Smith, CMO & EVP. Chuck is a specialist in business development in the data center industry. Chuck has held positions as Director and Vice-President of sales for various data center organizations. Chuck is responsible for strategic relationships, marketing and sales.
Lance Black, Executive Vice President of Operations. As the former CEO of Mareechi and the founder of that Dallas-based company, Lance spearheaded a managed services business that provided a range of services to businesses of all sizes. At Horizon, Lance continues to lead his team in supporting outsourced IT functions for all Horizon clients.
Jeff Crawford, Vice President of Sales. With over 10 years of direct sales and sales management experience in the telecom and data center space, Jeff leads the sales efforts for HDCS. Jeff comes to Horizon with a history of proven sales and sales management success, most recently at Internap, where he attained President’s Club status in 2007 and 2008 before leaving in 2009 to join us. Prior to his sales career, Jeff was a Master Training Specialist for the US Navy as part of the Naval Nuclear Power Program.
Jeff Kuerzi, Vice-President of Marketing and Sales Operations. With over fifteen years of traditional and digital marketing and advertising experience, Jeff leads the demand generation and marketing efforts for HDCS. Jeff has held Director and Vice-President positions with interactive media firms such as Centro, Belo Interactive, Knight-Ridder Digital and The Dallas Morning News.
Richard J. Nordberg JR, General Manager, Eastern Region, With 20+ years experience in management, sales, business development, marketing, product development, consulting, and technical sales support, Richard is a proven leader. He drove these efforts for MCI WorldCom, VeriSign, InfoRelay and HostVentures. Richard also served as Industrial Engineer and Chief, Industrial Engineering for the US Army and USAF, respectively, over a combined 11 years.
Eric Carter, Managing Director of US Operations and Technology Solutions. Eric is the former Director of IT of Mareechi and leads Horizon Virtual IT and ITO outsourcing operations. Eric has certifications from Cisco and MIcrosoft. He and his team support over 100 managed-services clients.
Clark Huffstetler, Director of Data Center Facilities. Clark has managed or construction-managed over 1 million square feet of data center space in his twenty-five years in the industry. Clark brings Director level experience from EDS, SBC and Atos Origin to his role as data center operations over-seer.
James Mangus, Director of Service Delivery. Jim has fifteen years of service delivery and program management experience. He is responsible for operations and service delivery for all HDCS data center and hosting clients.
Julie Middleton, Controller. Julie served Mareechi for over seven years as Operations Manager and Controller. She continues her role as Controller for Horizon and leads the Client Services team in its mission to achieve zero client turnover.
Brian Oravetz, Director of Government Services. Brian has fifteen years in the information technology industry, beginning his career as a solutions engineer for Bell South and most recently has worked with Software-As-A-Service product sets within the government and data center sectors.
Tom Escher, Director of Channel Sales. Tom has over 10 years experience in all aspects of the data center business in North American and Europe. He has worked in both the retail and wholesale sides of the business, as well as “up the stack” in managed services., with his previous positions at GlobalCenter, Exodus, Digex and Advanced Data Centers.