Thank you very much to August Ash, Incorporated, a Minneapolis Internet marketing firm, who partnered with us today to help bring you a webinar on search engine optimization. Two of their Internet marketing strategists, Shelley Sanders and Tim Karlberg, shared their expertise on the world of search engine optimization.
For quick access to the presentation, you can download a PDF of the slides.
If you missed the webinar or want to see it again, you can view the video in our webinar archive.
If you build it will they come? They did for Ray Kinsella in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams”. VISI too has been building and customers have been coming. We have invested in our St. Paul data center for several years, increasing power capacity, backup power systems, cooling, and facility space for our customers. Thank you to all who have come.
Now VISI is embarking on a new building effort, in more ways than one. In 2008 VISI moved our corporate offices to Eden Prairie. This fall we started construction at that location on the inaugural phase of what will expand into a 20,000 square foot data center. We are excited to begin work on this emerging data center for our existing and new customers.
The new facility will lay the foundation to meet the growing demand for data center space in this region by both local and national firms. Business customers come to VISI for managed hosting services and to colocate their computers in world-class data center facilities. Industry leaders understand that uncompromising reliability and high availability of their computer based applications are fundamental components to build their organizations and serve their customers. VISI provides the environment and support for these systems.
Like our St. Paul data center, the Eden Prairie facility will have traditional data center features such as raised floors, climate-controlled cooling, high density power capacity and high availability power provided by UPS and diesel power generators. This spring VISI installed our first ‘green’ flywheel UPS in St. Paul, and will be using the same technology in Eden Prairie. A flywheel UPS essentially stores energy for use when power is interrupted. It is a clean and cost-effective alternative to battery-based UPS units.
VISI data centers offer many attractive features including world class environmental controls, multiple carrier fiber network access, high security, SAS70 Type II audited business processes, and choice locations. These two primary facilities are 20 miles apart to meet business continuity and DR site requirements, and are on primary mass transit routes. Both facilities are served by bus service. The new Light Rail link to St. Paul will stop within 1 block of that VISI data center, and the proposed SW Light Rail route will stop within a block or two of our new Eden Prairie facility.
You can track the progress we’re making by subscribing to this blog or following us on Twitter or Facebook.
Our newest facility will open at the end of this year. VISI will build it. Will you to come and see?
Imagine 70% of your company’s revenue being generated from online sales. Now imagine that it takes between 30-60 seconds for each page to load. Frustrating? We can imagine.
Service Lighting (elightbulbs.com), located in Maple Grove, MN, struggled with this exact problem. “Trying to administer the server proved to be more of a distraction from our core business and presented us with performance and reliability issues that we weren’t staffed to handle,” said Paul McLellan, Vice President at Service Lighting.
In addition to performance worries, the overall reliability of the system quickly came into question when a hard drive failure brought down the entire server due to an improperly configured RAID controller. As e-commerce sales continued to grow at a rapid pace, “it was apparent that we didn’t have the true redundancy we required,” says McLellan.
That’s when they decided to give VISI a call. Our team took a look at their setup and recommended many changes, with our Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) based on VMware ESX playing a key role. Today, page loads are speedy, data migrations which used to take 45 minutes now take 20 seconds, and their service has become predictably reliable. McLellan says, “VISI knocked it out of the park. You cannot fabricate these kinds of results.”
We are pleased to hear such a success story from one of our customers. You can read the full story online.
We’re excited to announce that our CEO, Mike Sowada, has been named a Tekne Awards finalist by the Minnesota High Tech Association! Mike is one of three finalists in the category of Technology Executive of the Year for Small and Growing Businesses. The MHTA will reveal the winner on October 22nd at the Minneapolis Convention Center, only one day after VISI’s cloud computing seminar. Congratulations Mike!
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