European & US companies love Cloud Computing! But why Malaysian prefer on Hybrid Colocation?

Recently, I have came across a interesting study report that conducted by Manchester Business School (MBS) and Rackspace Hosting, and their research topic is about the impact of cloud computing on today's businesses. In summary of the report, on average, moving to the cloud computing saves a company around RM1,275,000 (or £255,000) every year or RM106,250 (or £21,250) every month.

Dr Brian Nicholson of the MBS said "The survey - which involved questioning 1,300 firms across the UK and the US - showed the benefits of cloud computing are being felt by many organisations, as 83% of firms that have adapted to this way of working have saved money by doing so. Meanwhile, 40% of companies in the UK indicated that the use of the cloud had helped their organisation to grow, with 56% using the money they are saving through this strategy to invest in other areas of their business."

Let's talk about this report for a minute, from my point of view, this reports is still conducted in US and UK, and of course it's more applicable for their countries. From the amount of what Cloud Computing can save for the companies have to tally with the amount of IT budget that average a European and US companies spent every year. Image if Cloud Computing can save RM1.2mil  or 50% of the company's IT budget, mean the company's default IT budget is RM2.4mil. 

In Malaysia, although not many of SME (Small & Medium Enterprise) company will allocate a million dollars as their IT budget annually, but the awareness of Cloud Computing has always come into their future plan to improve their current IT infrastructure, or plan to cut down their maintenance cost. Currently, many of SME companies are slowly moving their front-end or less important servers (such as web servers, file servers, email servers, and etc.) to cloud servers, while still maintain most of their critical servers (like database servers) with colocation hosting model. Usually, we will define such hosting model as Hybrid Colocation model. 

SO, why Hybrid Colocation hosting is still more popular in Malaysia? Or why IT managers here are more preferable to Hybrid Colocation hosting? From our interview with some existing clients, we noticed many of the IT person-in charge are still worry to migrate of the existing data or software, but willing to consider in converting its front-end server like web and email server into cloud computing. Many businesses have elements in their traditional environments that they are unable to move to a virtualised or cloud environment. So Hybrid Co-location solutions is always their first move into the cloud computing, that putting both allow  virtual and physical hardware together.

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Planned Maintenance on EVERWORKS's Hybrid Network

We received a planned notification email today (12th March 2013) from our upstream provider, Global Transit to upgrade their existing network equipment. The upgrade will be on our AIMS datacenter in Menara Aik Hua (MAH), and it is due to current usage/capacity almost reached threshold level.

This maintenance will ONLY affect all our Hybrid network clients, while nothing is affecting to our Premium network. The maintenance will start on 24-March-2013 00:00 GMT +8:00, and end on 24-March-2013 04:00 GMT +8:00. For more information, please refer to the email image that captured from Global Transit. Feel free to contact our network team at cvs@everworks.com for more information.

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IT Support Outsourcing Turn In More Profit

The festive season has comes to an end... with bellies full of the festive goodies and hearts fill with warmth with loved ones. During the long holiday, is your business operation working fine? Is your IT solution working smoothly? Did you have a headache with your IT support while having your break?

No worries. EVERWORKS is here to provide you with the BEST solution for your company. At EVERWORKS  our CVS team strives to ensure that your business is running smoothly while you are hassle-free doing what you do best. With this in mind, we think that outsourcing your company's IT Support can benefit your business and turn in more profit to your company.

It's a Matter of Trust!


How Outsourcing IT Support Benefit Your Business and Turn in More Profit
When running a business, it can be tough making a decision regarding whether to hire an in-house IT support department or outsource instead. There are instances when it is far easier to just hire an in-house IT department, but there are more benefits in outsourcing IT support.

Cost Savings

It is widely known that outsourced labor helps to save up to 90% of the project price if comparing with USA and Western prices. You don’t have to spend time and cost recruiting, hiring, training and housing the employees permanently or for short-term projects.

Time Savings

You have dedicated expertise who will be able to get things done faster and more accurately. The deployment or troubleshooting were done and sorted out quickly, you will be standing ahead of your competitor.

Lack of in-house Experience

Outsourcing IT support could become a great solution when the in-house labor resources of the company are not enough to provide the necessary support to the company's clients.

Talented IT Professionals

Outsourcing companies accumulate the best information technology and software development brain, so you have the access to this pool of talented professionals who will be managing your company's IT support.

Focused Strategy

Outsourcing companies are best in building effective IT support. This provides good support to your business while you can focused only on achieving competitive advantages from the outsourced projects.

Technologies Advances

IT Support outsourcing companies have specialization in many areas and they can provide clients (such as you) with the best technology, hardware and software to assist you in your business needs and requirements.

Risk Mitigation

You can reduce risks for your business by choosing the right outsourcing partner that has quality project management and quality assurance system like us - EVERWORKS.



At EVERWORKS, we've built our culture on mitigating the risks of outsourced IT by providing great customer service, repeatable best practices and software built from the ground-up. Our Critical Velocity Support (CVS) Team, which includes phone or email services 24 hours per day, has helped us to become the optimal solution in IT Solutions. It also can help you put the concerns of outsourcing to rest.

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What is our Colocation Power Usage Policy?

Power is one of the largest expenses in running a datacenter, and of course datacenter can easily make loss or close shop if improper manage of their power policy. Today, you can notice that almost every hosting provider in Malaysia are now implementing such  policy in controlling power usage for their colocation solutions (mainly also because datacenter in Malaysia have started to bill for additional power and limit the power allocation. Last time some just give no limit!).  

In fact, Power has become one of the key points in datacentre colocation, even more so than space. For colocation market, Power Usage Policy (PUP) is only applicable to Multiple Colocation solution, as Single Colocation solution is only giving one power point for one server. For colocation market, Power Usage Policy (PUP) is only applicable to Multiple Colocation solution, as Single Colocation solution is only giving one power point for one server. 

If you have gone through some web hosting provider for Multiple Colocation, and I guess you may seem some specification terms like 'Power Allocation' with 0.4kW for 10U Colocation or 0.7kW for 21U (Half Rack), or 0.7kW for 42U (Full Rack). Meaning to say, you are giving this such of power for your colocation every month, and you will be charge 'extra' if exceeded the limit. Currently, the market rate for power is between RM0.68 to RM0.75 per kWh (where this is very much depend on the datacenter building & infrastructure companies such as AIMS). From our survey, most of the colocation providers are putting this cost back-to-back to their clients). 

But honestly, how many of you really know how to count if exceeded the quota? Let me use one scenario to explain on this.   

"Our default power allocation for Full Rack colocation is 1.5kW (which is a standard practice in market). Assumethat you are estimating about 3kW monthly to support all your servers, then you need additional 1.5kW power with additional of RM0.68/kWh. So how much is 1.5kW? 

1.5kWx 24 hours x 30 days x RM 0.68/kWH = RM 734.40

In summary, we are concluded the power usage formula like this: 

<Total Usage in kW> x 24 hours x 30 days x <Cost of Power>

Like I mentioned earlier, most of the colocation providers will apply the same power cost that vendor charged them back to their colocation clients, so you can roughly know their cost to their vendor on power, as well as to predict their margin in market. 

Power Usage Policy (PUP) for Shared Rack Colocation: 

As we know, Power Usage Policy is only applied to Multiple Colocation solutions such as 10U (Quarter Rack), 21U (Half Rack), 42U (Full Rack) and etc. Most of the server racks in EVERWORKS are only installed with one power meter to measure its power usage for each different rack, as well as to configure with 1.5kW as our default power usage allocation. That's mean we will be allocating 0.04kW (1.5kW /  37U) for each colocation 'U'. As we know, one full rack has 42U of colocation space, then why we divide by 37U in this formula? This is because every shared rack that designed for Multiple Colocation will take up 4U space to install the tray. Hence, we can't bundle this 4U space into our client's bill.

Implementation of our Shared Power Usage Policy is just like how we managing our Shared Hosting servers, all available resources within the server and network will be shared among all existing web hosting clients. For this Shared Power Usage Policy, we are equally sharing the default of power allocation of 1.5kW. E.g. if you are subscribed to 10U Multiple Colocation, then you will get 0.40kW (10 x 0.04kW = 0.0394kW) of power allocation.

Your next question will be, how do we 'share' the additional charges if the rack has exceed the limit of 1.5kW? Just simple, we will share the exceeded power usage among the existing colocation clients under the rack with according to their occupancy space. E.g. assume that a rack has hit 2.0kW end of the month, that mean the total exceeded power usage is only 0.5kW (2.0kW - 1.5kW), or 0.013kw per U. If you are subscribed to 10U Multiple Colocation, then you will be responsible for 0.13kW, which is equal to RM63.70  (0.13kW x RM490).

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What is EVERWORKS's Hybrid Bandwidth System?

EVERWORKS is among the 1st Datacenter Hosting Provider (DHP) in Malaysia, who deployed the Hybrid Bandwidth System that allow our customers to customize their bandwidth pattern – either to focus on local or international bandwidth. Today, a lot of web hosting companies and datacenter providers already configured such bandwidth system as their main bandwidth system that packaged to all their products, and of course it can make your package look more price competencies than who are still bundling with oversea upstream providers. 


EVERWORKS’s Hybrid Network is designed for our datacenter hosting clients who need to serve more Malaysian traffic than international visitors. Hence, a lot of our customer who are colocating or renting servers under this network system are usually serving more Malaysian than oversea traffic for their online business (meaning to say most of their internet traffic is from Malaysia). 

Colocating your equipment with EVERWORKS’s Hybrid Network gives you more than just state-of-the art datacenter facilities, but to saves your total recurrence investment on bandwidth in today’s economy. You may visit our website, www.everworks.com for more information on our server colocation package, and we have categorized our package very well with this Hybrid bandwidth. Furthermore, we still offer the non-hybrid bandwidth system to some of oversea clients, who are only or mainly serving oversea traffic (which is currently available in our AIMS Datacenter, package name as Premium). Below are the some explanation when evaluating EVERWORKS's colocation package.  

Example of Who Should Consider our Hybrid Bandwidth System? 
1. Telcos Solution Provider 
2. Malaysian Forum Provider 
3. Malaysian Blogger 
4. Malaysian Portal 
5. Local Data Backup (SAN) 
6. WAP-based Solution Provider
7. Local Messaging Providers
8. Internal Billing & CRM System
9.  Disaster Recovery Site


Finally, let's talk about how Hybrid Bandwidth is born in Malaysia's Internet Industry? Firstly, I think everyone of us should say thank to the MYIX (Malaysia Internet Exchange) - www.myix.my, who formed in 2006 after the reviewed of MCMC, with main objective of moving back local traffic being routed via MyIX away from international bandwidth links. Another simply word, without this implementation, Malaysian Internet users and providers will keep paying the higher price for their bandwidth. And this is definitely stopping the industry to grow! To know more about them, you may visit their website at www.myix.my. 

So what is the benefits? Of course, by escaping this, many of local operators especially the smaller ISPs enjoy cost savings due to domestic peering. Technically, by peering within MyIX network, mean the local traffic (such as a TM users accessing to Lelong.com.my servers hosted in TM or any local datacenter in Malaysis) is kept domestically, therefore, the boomerang traffic is kept at a minimum and latency between peering operators has improved. In another word, why we are paying so much higher bandwidth before this, is due to all local access are passing by all these international upstream provider such as Level3, Pacnet, PCCW, and etc. 

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Are you vulnerable to SQL Injection?

Recently, we have came across some enquiries with regards to 'SQL Injection Attacks', as well as to 'How to Protect your Database in some simply' to prevent such attacks! Basically, what is SQL Injection? To understand how this thing works, and it will help you tore-evaluate your online business well! SQL Injection Attacks can be a very serious threat to your online business. Today, we are trying to share you guys some basic information on 'How a SQL Injection Attack works?', and "What you can do to prevent it'? 


How a SQL Injection Attack works?
Any site that runs on a database has the potential to be compromised by this threat. When a malicious person or script is targeting your website, they try entering certain special characters and strings in any area of the site that accepts user input. These areas are usually Forms for user data such as a login form or comment posts. When the form is submitted, your site sends the data that is in the text fields to the Database Server in what is called a "Query".

What you can do to prevent it?
The object of SQL injection attacks is basically to modify the query so that it runs malicious code. This malicious code varies between attacks, but if successful, it can gain access to all the data in your database, including modifying content. To secure your site from these attacks, you will have to inspect your coding. Your primary defense is to tell your developer to ensure that your site is safe from SQL Injection Attacks. Most developers will know what this means; any user-inputted data is validated and sanitized to ensure it is not malicious.

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Migration for DiGi's Gateway with Double Opt-In features POSTPONED!

Due to DiGi is facing some internal issue now, the migration of EVERWORKS short codes for DiGi's Gateway with Double Opt-In features is postponed until further notice! We will keep you update once the migration date is confirmed!

Well, many of us might still don't know what is this term "Double Opt-In" stands for and why it is so important. Let's have a some brief here:

"Double Opt-In" is the term initially used in the email marketing environment, a user has subscribed for a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it and confirming the email address to be his/her own. This is usually done by responding to a confirmation email sent to the email address in question.
This eliminates the chance of abuse where somebody submits somebody else's email address without their knowledge and against their will.

When put this term in the SMS content environment, for all the acquisitions or subscriptions of mobile content services, all mobile content services providers shall send a SMS to the acquirer or subscriber, requesting the acquirer or subscriber to confirm his/her request. This action is hereafter referred to as Double Opt-In or Double Confirmation.
This action is so important to make sure the user is clear about his/her acquisitions or subscriptions in term of the content charges, frequency of delivery, termination info, etc.; and this action will further eliminate the complaints and arguments from the users about the unsolicited SMS content as all the relevant info are cleared stated before the actual content is delivering over to the users.

FYI, SMS Double Opt-In process has been implemented in some major Telcos in other countries such as USA, UK, Indonesia, China, etc. for years. In Malaysia, this going to be implemented soon in the near future. So, be prepared and happy SMSing!

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