Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) has announced the launch of its global managed hosting and storage services for enterprises seeking to enhance efficiencies, reduce ownership costs, improve service quality and ensure business continuity in their IT infrastructure environments.

The fully managed services offer streamlined, scalable and highly secure management of IT infrastructure, network and storage initially in three globally diverse, world-class data centres in New York, Singapore and London. Each centre is located directly on VSNL''s high performance, high capacity, and high reliability global communications backbone.

VSNL''s managed hosting solution offers enterprises the ability to outsource systems and applications to a VSNL global data centre, optimising resources, reducing costs, and guaranteeing the availability and security of data, it combines data centre facilities, VSNL''s global network, LAN infrastructure, security and server systems in a fully managed, bundled solution, backed by a 24x7 managed services operations centre. The service supports a complete suite of operating systems environments including Windows, Solaris, and Linux.

The managed storage solution offers a subscription-based utility model, enabling enterprises to cost effectively and reliably store mission critical data with the benefits of a redundant, state of the art fibre channel storage area network (SAN), and protection against technology upgrades, VSNL''s advanced storage service provides capacity on demand, allowing customers to buy storage on an as needed basis to ensure predictable operational costs and accommodate for variable capacity demands. This model significantly reduces costs versus dedicated external storage options and eliminates the upfront investments involved in creating a dedicated private SAN.

"Our global customers can use VSNL''s best-of-breed managed hosting and storage solution to safely out-task services and to reduce IT management complexity," said Vinod Kumar, president, global data solutions, VSNL.

"This cost effective, highly resilient managed IT infrastructure service is powered by VSNL''s globally consistent and centralised management platform, technical expertise and industry best practices. The combination of our IT infrastructure solutions with our global network capabilities enables customers with a complete end-to-end solution."

Kumar added, "VSNL has consciously decided to build a dedicated managed services operation from the ground up, investing in mastering the ITIL service management framework to ensure high quality delivery. This launch is a significant leap forward in executing on VSNL''s mission to become a leading managed services provider, as it provides the platform for us to introduce new forward looking services such as managed applications, business continuity solutions and global virtualisation capability."

VSNL''s managed hosting and storage solution is ideally suited for enterprise customers looking to consolidate, expand, centralise or globalise their IT infrastructure, while reducing the cost of data centre facilities, 24x7x365 data centre management, highly skilled IT resources, global IT platforms and global networking. The service is also targeted toward content providers and application service providers (ASPs) seeking to quickly reach and support customers in specific regions around the world without significant investments in local assets, high cost IT resources and data centre facilities.