divine Managed Services Plays Host at Hacienda

By George Walsh, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

Intira, Other Acquisitions Combined into Hosting for Enterprise Applications

The more we rely on computer technology, the more we demand from the machinery itself. In many cases, the technological needs of companies exceed what they can accomplish on-site with either their computer hardware resources, their human information technology (IT) resources, or both. This is especially true for larger companies with huge databases of customer information or those providing services and applications over the Internet where systems can be strained by thousands of simultaneous users.

divine Managed Services, which just signed a new lease at 5667 Gibraltar Drive in Hacienda, works to provide solutions to these problems. A managed services company "hosts" data or applications from its clients on high-end, up-to-date computer systems, providing the human IT support to make these hosted resources available, secure, and safe from corporate nightmares like natural disasters. divine's 55,449 square foot facility, formerly the home of Intira, provides both network and data management services.

Keeping its customers' data safe is the utmost priority, as evidenced by the list of security and safety measures the site provides:

Crossbeams, supports, and seismic shock absorbers to withstand earthquakes up to 8.5 on the Richter scale.
Physical security around the data center provided by steel plating behind external windows, internal walls reinforced with bulletproof Kevlar, bulletproof glass, vehicle barriers, and closed circuit video monitoring both inside the facility and around the perimeter.
Redundant backup electrical power via dual uninterruptible power supply battery backup feeds and two 1.5 megawatt diesel generators with a 15,000-gallon double walled diesel fuel tank with enough fuel for approximately one week of continuous operation under load. (Multiple diesel fuel vendors are under contract to supply fuel in the event of a long-term public utility power outage.)
Cooling throughout the data center and support areas provided by a redundant closed chiller system and zone-controlled air handlers.
FM200 fire suppression and a multi-zone detection grid for moisture and smoke detection protect the data center from fire and water damage.

Obviously, when it comes to data and systems, divine means business. "What we do is build, host, and provide fully managed services for an enterprise's critical applications," says Don Small, vice president of operations engineering for divine Managed Services. "We do that by employing a team of seasoned engineers capable of providing the services, the architectural builds, and development on both the operating system and hosting side for complex environments."

With this infrastructure in place, a customer puts their application or data within it, with the option of using one of divine's many software applications. divine manages and supports primarily Unix and Microsoft environments and provides redundant load balancing (which keeps systems from getting overloaded when too many users access them at once), storage, and database availability.divine Managed Services is the result of a number of corporate acquisitions made over the past 18 months, including Intira. The site employs 50 people and, while the majority are devoted to divine Managed Services, a few members from of the company's Professional Services and Software Services groups work out of the Pleasanton Office.

Photo: Greg Thornton works on one of divine's rack-mounted servers.

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