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x Service (Local Cloud) Policy

This schedule contains additional Terms of Service, Service Description, Acceptable Use and Service Levels specific to the “x” Service Local Cloud elements of the Services provided by Pipe Ten and should be viewed with the associated Order, Pipe Ten’s general Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.

Overview

Pipe Ten’s “x” Service provides access to a self-service virtualisation platform hosted on infrastructure owned by Pipe Ten. The infrastructure is securely shared across multiple customers and can hosted across Pipe Ten’s different data centres which provide physical security and resilient power and cooling.

Pipe Ten manage the infrastructure up to the Hypervisor and ensure a portal is available for provisioning.

By default, Customers manage their Virtual Machines. Pipe Ten can also provide management of virtual machine operating systems for an additional charge as part of their Expertise Services.

The components of the “x” Service are:

Self-Service Portal

Web-based portal(s) and tools for self-service provisioning and management of the components of the Services.

Pipe Ten will provide one or more Self-Service Portals which the Customer can use to perform a set of provisioning and management tasks for their virtual machines, storage and backups.

Customers are allocated one or more usernames and passwords which are used to access the portals. Each username is assigned to a single user within the Customer’s organisation. The portals are secured using firewalls and SSL encryption. Pipe Ten may use multi-factor authentication to secure the portals.

x-net

A pair of high availability firewalls managed by Pipe Ten with an agreed allocation of monthly data transfer to provide secure network communication between the public internet and the customer’s Virtual Machines.

Pipe Ten will provision a pair of High Availability Virtual Firewalls using pfSense stateful packet inspection in Active/Passive mode with the agreed IP address and data transfer allocation. These come fully managed by Pipe Ten’s engineering team. Any changes to the firewall’s configuration must be raised by the customer via their support centre. Any required changes in Traffic Allocation required can be made via the Support Portal and must not violate any prior commitments made on any Order.

x-compute

A pool of memory (RAM) and processor (vCPU) on shared virtualisation hardware on which the Customer runs Virtual Machines.

Pipe Ten will reserve a pool of compute resources on physical hosts that form part of the “x” Service Hypervisor platform. These hosts are securely shared between multiple customers. Customer Virtual machines run within this pool of resources. The amount of resource required by the Customer must be specified on the Order in the form of units which include a set amount of virtual processor cores (vCPU) and a set amount in gigabytes of virtual RAM (vRAM) required.

Each pool is provided within a single data centre and Virtual Machines cannot be transferred between sites without the use of disaster recovery technology.

The Customer may request to change the amount of vCPU and vRAM in the pool. A request to reduce the amount of vCPU and/or vRAM must not violate any prior commitments made on any Order.

Virtual CPUs and Memory are not contended, they are dedicated solely for the use of the customer, meaning that a vCPU is equivalent to a physical processor core and 1GB vRAM is equivalent to a 1GB physical memory chip. If a pool is created with 8 vCPU and 16GB of RAM, and a single virtual machine is created with 4 vCPU and 8GB of RAM, then the Customer’s pool is 50% full.

x-store

An agreed allocation of disk storage units on SSD.

If specified on the Order, Pipe Ten will reserve a pool of local flash (SSD) disk storage resources on which the Customer’s virtual machine disks are stored and run. The Self-Service Portal software is used to isolate a quota of capacity and ensure that it is only visible to the correct customer. A customer is not able to access storage used by other customers. Each pool of storage is limited to a single data centre.

The Order must specify the amount of required storage in useable GB. The Customer is charged for the space allocated to the pool and not for the actual space allocated to virtual machine disks. Storage must only be consumed by Virtual Machines and may not be presented out for consumption over the network from other devices, including those in colocation.

Virtual Machines

Operating system instances running on Compute Resource.

Expertise

The setup of the “x” Service is included with optional provisioning of Virtual Machines and installation of certain applications available.

Support Portal

Web-based portal for managing the Customer’s billing and Support Services from Pipe Ten.

Pipe Ten will provide access to a support portal which manages the Customer’s billing and gives the customer access to connect with Pipe Ten’s support team. The portal is secured using firewalls and SSL encryption. Pipe Ten may use multi-factor authentication to secure the portal.

Additional Services

The “x” Service can be combined to take advantage of Pipe Ten’s other services including Expertise, Addressing, Maintenance, Monitoring, Security and Backup.

Fees

Fees are billed in accordance with Pipe Ten’s Terms of Service as per the Customer’s order. 

Responsibilities

Pipe Ten agree to manage the infrastructure up to the Hypervisor level and any X-Net firewalls. The Customer is responsible for the management and configuration of their Virtual Machines. Pipe Ten reserves the right to offer the version of the applications that it considers most appropriate to use to provide their “x” Service and to modify the available applications at any time.

Provision Of Service

Pipe Ten will perform the following before informing the Customer that the service is ready for use:

  • Physically install compute nodes.
  • Install the XCP-ng hypervisor on the compute nodes.
  • Join the compute nodes to the Xen Orchestra software and Self-Service Portals.
  • Create a Customer account on the Self Service Portal.
  • Create a Customer account on the Support Portal.
  • Configure the portal to allow access by the Customer to provision their solution.
  • Create an allocation (pool) of CPU, memory, storage as specified on the Order and agreed by Pipe Ten.
  • Pipe Ten will provision 2 High Availability Virtual Firewalls in Active/Passive mode with the agreed IP address and data transfer allocation.
  • If specified on the Order, Pipe Ten will provision Virtual Machines, installing the desired operating system with Anti-Virus software using Pipe Ten’s Expertise Service. A charge shall be levied for each virtual machine that is provisioned via Pipe Ten’s Expertise Service. Pipe Ten will not configure the operating system as part of this component other than the parameters needed in order to provision the virtual machine, such as an IP address and hostname. This does not include the cost of any operating system licenses which can be purchased through Pipe Ten’s Licensing Service and can also take advantage of Pipe Ten’s Patching Service.
  • Pipe Ten will define a password at the time of provisioning which must be changed by the Customer after handover of the virtual machine to the Customer.
  • If specified on the Order, Pipe Ten will perform the installation of certain applications onto the operating system of a virtual machine immediately after the build using Pipe Ten’s Expertise Service. Installation is charged for every application in every virtual machine. This will be at the sole discretion of Pipe Ten and subject to bespoke pricing. This does not include the cost of any software licenses or any configuration of the software or patching of the application after installation.
  • If specified on the Order, Pipe Ten will Configure Backup software to perform replication of Virtual Machines as required using Pipe Ten’s Backup Service.
  • Anything outside of the above that may be required to be set up by the customer is the customer’s responsibility.
  • The Customer represents and warrants that they have or have access to the knowledge and expertise necessary to configure, maintain, monitor, and secure their Virtual Machines.

Maintenance Of Service

Monitoring

Pipe Ten will monitor the Pipe Ten infrastructure via the Pipe Ten monitoring system to provide pro-active fault management up to the Hypervisor level during the contracted support hours.

As standard the following are monitored:

  • Device response time/device availability,
  • Interface statistics (utilisation & errors),
  • CPU and Memory usage.

In the event the device stops responding, or a monitored threshold is exceeded, Technical Support Centre will pro-actively investigate the issue during the contracted support hours.

By default Pipe Ten will not monitor Customer Virtual Machines. This can be added via Pipe Ten’s Monitoring & Response services.

Software Patching

Pipe Ten will apply software updates and patches to the Pipe Ten infrastructure up to the hypervisor level when they are required due to software defect (bug) or security vulnerability at an agreed frequency and during the maintenance window, patches may require a reboot of the operating system which may result in downtime of the Customer Virtual Machines. This shall not be considered as downtime for the calculation of service levels or service credits. Where multiple servers are used for redundancy (for example a pair of web servers), the Virtual Machines shall be rebooted separately. The Customer is responsible for software updates and patches to Virtual Machines which can be managed through Pipe Ten’s patching services.

Maintenance Windows

Where Pipe Ten plans to perform essential works and the changes are service affecting, Pipe Ten will use reasonable endeavours to perform such works outside of core office hours and will use reasonable endeavours to give the Customer at least five (5) days prior notice for network related work and at least ten (10) days prior notice for Infrastructure related work. In the event of an emergency or Service Affecting Fault such notice may be less than 24 hours.

Support

Pipe Ten provides “x” Services direct to the Customer up to the hypervisor level only. The Customer commits to fully manage all their customers and suppliers directly. Pipe Ten can also provide support of virtual machine operating systems and specific software as part of their Expertise Services.

Service Levels

Pipe Ten’s global SLA and Schedules document covering the availability of Support, Accounts, Expertise, Data Centre Standards, Network, Hardware, Patching, Monitoring & Response and Backup applies to all customers taking the “x” Service.

Guarantees with regard to the availability and response of “x” Service Components are as follows:

  • X-Compute: 99.9%
  • X-Net: 99.9%
  • X-Store availability: 99.9%
  • Self-Service Portal: 95%
  • Support Portal: 95%
  • Support Response: 3 hours

All faults recorded by the Pipe Ten Monitoring System will be reconciled against the corresponding fault ticket raised by the Technical Support Centre. The exact fault duration will be calculated as the elapsed time between the fault being reported to the Technical Support Team and the time when Service is restored.

The “x” Service is considered available if all Hypervisor hosts hosting the Customer Virtual Machines are operating in a normal state. If a Hypervisor node fails, and the Virtual Machines are migrated to another node, then downtime shall be considered as the time between a) the time the Hypervisor node is detected as no longer functioning and b) the time the Virtual Machines start to power on another host.

Availability levels apply to the Hypervisor platform and are not measured per virtual machine. Outages caused by third party software installations or other modifications to the Virtual Machine’s operating system as deployed do not fall within the terms of the Service Level Agreement.

Additional services

It should be assumed that any activity or element of a service that is not described in this schedule is not provided as part of the “x” Service and is subject to the specific policy regarding that particular service.


Last changed: 2019/08/14 at 13:23 by Gavin Kimpton

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Last saved: 2024/01/24 at 16:21 by Carl