DC Maintenance Reports

[SPS]

Greetings !!

We have rented DC space with a company in dubai to host our mission critical systems.
The safety & Security department in my company is demanding the Hosting company to provide the following:

• scanned copies of the Maintenance reports & Service reports for the DC infrastructure.
• Single Line Diagram for the Power infrastructure in the DC.

i was going through the contract and according to that the hosting company is not obliged to fulfill such requests.

My question to the experts in this forum is, is it a practice in the hosting industry to meet such requests.
Does any of the hosting companies provide such reports to its customers, from the hosting service provider's perspective.

Appreciate your feedback.

SPS

[dbarker]

Hi,

It really does depend on the facility - Before we opened our own site we struggled to get confirmation of maintenance out of some of the DC providers we used at the time (One of the reasons for pressing ahead with our own facility).

We have a running folder which contains copies of the latest maintenance reports, testing schedules, etc which is available for clients to review should they (or their clients) need confirmation that the work we said has been has actually been done.

There might be a security concern at some facilities about providing scanned copies of such information as it's potentially sensitive to the site security however an NDA or only allowing the information to be viewed onsite would be one way around this.

As an aside which company are you using in Dubai? We've been floating the idea of opening a DC in the Internet Free Zone at some point in the next few years however network connectivity is the main concern for us at the moment.

David

[SPS]

Thanks David for the info.
UAE has a couple of big players in the market such as Ehosting Datafort, Etisalat & Injazzat.
Other small time players in this market are ASP gulf, & Mindscape IT.
in the last 6 months Dubai has witnessed some new players getting into the market such as majal (established in Ras Al Khaima, one of the UAE emirate) & an company floated by Dubai financial center.(cant recollect the name of the company)
we are with Ehosting datafort as they are very well established and they provide managed infrastucture services as well, unlike others who are only into pure colocation services.
Injazat has better Dc infrastructure, but are extremly expensive

As you have rightly pointed out, bandwidth cost here in UAE is an deterring factor for hosting business..

Hope this bit helps

Thank you once again.