Quantum Private Cloud

Quantum is a purpose-built Cloud environment that solves a key business challenge for SMB’s in New Zealand. You want to take advantage of the benefits of Cloud, such as a robust shared platform with scalability, management, disaster recovery and security built-in, but without the unchartered and potentially expensive charges that are often associated with Public Cloud, and this can be especially true if your environment is not fully public Cloud ready.

Tribe’s Quantum is built on enterprise class infrastructure, with core compute and storage environment built in partnership top global vendors. There are class-leading firewalls in High Availability clusters and dedicated local and cloud disaster recover systems as well as a range of fibre networking (10GB through to 100GB) across the entire infrastructure to ensure highest possible performance for mission critical applications.

The following service outline is to provide clarity on the overall service deliverables that make up a part of the Quantum experience and to avoid any ‘unexpected’ surprises. We think Quantum is awesome, we want you to think the same thing so lets make sure we are all on the same page!

Customer Instance

When a customer is new to Tribe’s Quantum Private Cloud services places an order (like you!), we will provision those services into a new instance. Each customer instance by default has the following features:

• Tribe supplied internet connection with 1 Public IP address
• Tribe supplied firewall
• Virtual network with internal IP address space
• Other virtual systems provisioned as per your sizing and storage requirements, e.g. servers with CPU, RAM & storage allocations.

If you are an existing Tribe Quantum customer and wish to provision new services that are not part of your existing Instance (i.e. these systems should not be able to communicate directly with each other, and exist totally separately), please specify that you require a new Customer Instance. Please note that there are base requirements and charges for each Instance.

It is possible to transfer existing compatible internet services but please be aware this may create delays in provisioning, some internet providers require 30 days’ notice to provision new services, they may need to ship extra equipment or even install new services into our data center which can further delay provisioning. Where you bring your own internet service with you, Tribe will undertake reasonable efforts to support the connection with the 3rd party, but does not accept responsibility for performance or outages due to 3rd party provided systems.

Order Placement

Tribe needs to receive a signed online order that outlines the number, type and size of all devices that are to be provisioned in your instance.

Once all details of the pending services are clearly outlined and the order agreed your Tribe customer team will kick off any migration project associated with the move and Quantum will begin a provisioning project.

For any large & complex environments to be migrated into Quantum this may require extra planning and lead time. With such large & complex environments, a full scoped project needs to be created by Tribe’s Technical Delivery team to ensure a smooth migration and to provide clear time lines.

Migration

Tribe can handle the migration of your existing systems into Quantum. Migration can take one of several forms which are broadly categorised as follows:

• On Premise Hardware Migration – systems installed at your premises that are directly installed on hardware will be migrated.
• On Premise Virtualised Migration – systems installed at your premises which are in an existing virtual environment will be migrated.
• Private Cloud Migration – your systems are currently hosted with another Private hosting provider and require migration.
• Public Cloud Migration – your systems are currently hosted in a Public cloud such as AWS, Google or Azure and require migration.

Depending on where your existing services requiring migration are hosted the strategy will vary. Some smaller environments that are highly compatible with Quantum will provide a very quick and easy path and can be provisioned at short notice and with minimal effort.

In environments where there are physical considerations or where systems are not immediately compatible will need proper planning and notice to ensure a successful migration with little downtime, please talk to your Tribe Customer Team to ensure you get the right information about your migration path.

Provisioning

Provisioning is defined as the process of creating your instance once and order has been placed and signed off. Once the provisioning process has started the Quantum team will provide an initial target Go Live date within 2 working days.

Depending on the complexity of your environment, the provisioning process can take from a few hours to a few days. Of course, this is from the time the process actually begins! Before you place your order please ask your customer team to check on a current timeline, as if there are any other major migrations going on when you are provisioned there may be a slight delay. All provisioning setups are carried out strictly in the order they are received, so it pays to get in quick and ensure you book your place!

You will not be billed for any subscription services on Quantum until Provisioning is completed.

If you are moving from a current live system over to Quantum then your customer team will work with the Quantum team to ensure a smooth transition, organise any required downtime with you and carefully plan the date and time of transition to minimise risk and disruption.

Included Changes

There are a number of changes you or your customer team can request at any time and are included as a part of the overall Quantum service. These are smaller changes which require little or no planning and only require your permission to carry them out. Your customer team may also request these on your behalf. These include:

• Firewall rule changes*
• Taking a snapshot** of any single VM before a change
• Restarting a VM
• Resizing a VM

*The occasional Firewall rule change is all good (1 or 2 in a month), however if there is a large number of changes that could be potentially impactful, the Quantum team may go back to your customer team and ask this be carried out as a project for you instead – to ensure that this is properly implemented and managed to the defined outcomes sought.

**A snapshot is a ‘copy’ of your system made at a hypervisor level, if there is a problem during your change this can be used as a quick way to revert to where you were just before the change. Tribe only keeps these snapshots temporarily; we raise a ticket for their removal after 24 hours and delete them after 3 days.

Disaster Recovery

The Quantum environment includes a robust local and cloud Disaster Recovery system built in. This takes hourly backups of all your environment and if there is an unexpected issue allows you to restore to any previous successful backup.

The Tribe Quantum team proactively monitors and checks on the backup state of your environment every day, and every night each of your devices running in Quantum are ‘spun up’ as live machines, that is we take the backup that night of your device and restore it to ensure it restores successfully. We take screenshots of these restores which we keep, showing the latest restore was successful.

If any backup or restore process fails, the Quantum team take care of getting it working again. We will raise an incident on your behalf and your technical contact will be informed we are working through a process until backups are put right.

Once a year at your request we can run a full Disaster Recovery (DR) Test. There are some minor charges associated with this process as it takes considerable planning and effort to bring your entire environment into production in the DR environment. However this also provides a complete ‘runbook’ of the restore process. Please contact your customer team to plan out this process, it will need clear ownership on both your and our side to be successful!

RTO & RPO

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are important considerations in DR planning that should be discussed with your customer team. RTO is the period of time between when a failure happens and your operations return to operation. RPO is the amount of data loss between the time the last successful backup happened and the time that systems can be bought back into operation. Note that in most cases the RPO will always be longer than the RTO.

RTO is set by the amount of time it takes for Quantum staff to be alerted that your environment is not responding, and where a recovery process is deemed the best course of action, the amount of time it takes to create a new machine from the last known good backup (a Restored Virtual Machine) and put that machine into production. When restoring a single machine during business hours Tribes RTO is 1 hour. When restoring multiple servers or an entire environment this time will be increased by roughly 30 minutes per machine. For an accurate RTO objective for multiple machines a full DR Test is required.

Recovery Point objective is generally calculated as the time between backups (1 hour) plus the RTO time, 1 hour. In most cases the RPO can be expected to be 2 hours.

If your entire environment needs to be restored (due to an overall failure at the local data centre such as fire/flood/earthquake) in the Datto Recovery Cloud, this process will be managed by Tribe and Datto. Tribe will work with you and give regular updates as to timelines. Depending on the size and complexity of your environment it can take some hours to full restore all systems back to working.

Right Sizing

Quantum undertakes a “Right-Sizing” process bi-annually across your Cloud hosted environment. We use tools to assess your current use of the environment and will provide a report that shows current usage and any recommendations on changes to be made proactively for your environment to ensure you continue to operate efficiently, these may include adding more resources to a machine, or where a machine is over-resourced, we may suggest lowering the resources to save you money.

Subscription Charges

This is where you need to change existing services as opposed to provision news services (i.e. a whole new server). Example of a change to a service is:

• Adding or reducing storage capacity to a server, i.e. increasing disk size
• Increasing or reducing compute, i.e. adding vCPU’s
• Increasing or decreasing RAM
• Adding or removing public IP addresses
• Adding or removing VPN’s (virtual private network connections)

In this case you will continue to be invoiced for the same overall service – just the amounts you actually subscribe to use will be updated on your invoice. We require one (1) business day notice via a ticket at hello@tribe.co.nz to make these changes. You will receive an updated ticket and notification once the changes have been made.

Quantum Internet

Internet connections supplied by Tribe are backed by our premium Partner, Kordia. They are business grade connections on dark fibre specifically designed for data centre usage. Tribe ensures high throughput by keeping contention to an extremely low 3 to 1 (compared to typical 7 to 1 business or consumer 100’s to 1 contention). On request customers can specify full uncontended bandwidth however this is rarely warranted or advantageous.

Quantum Firewall

Tribe’s Quantum firewall service is provided as a vdom (vdom or ‘virtual domain’ is the name Fortinet gives to a single firewall Instance on a shared secure firewall platform) on our High Availability (HA) clustered hardware firewall infrastructure. This vdom is private to you and all settings and rules applied to it are specific to your needs.

Tribe monitor firmware versions on our Managed Firewalls through our centralised management platform, and take regular backups of the vdom configuration if you ever need to roll back changes. Tribe will inform you of any important firewall updates and either use a pre-defined outage window or request an outage window to perform an update if downtime is needed – this is typically not the case with the HA cluster, but may be required in some specific cases.

Performance

It is always difficult to estimate how any given application will perform in a virtualised environment. Tribe’s consultants will work with you before deployment to understand the current environment and clarify any required fine-tuning needed to ensure your application(s) will perform optimally. Our platform is built utilising all flash storage, high speed networking and firewalling, as well as high performance compute nodes to ensure that the basics of performance are taken care of.

Billing

You will be billed in arrears for the month that services start, this will be a pro-rata invoice based on the amount of service received.

Billing will commence from the time the Quantum team has gone ‘live’ with your environment. You will not be billed for stand-up time during a migration process, and any charges related to testing should be included in your migration project.

Cancellation

You can cancel Quantum services at any time, however, please be aware you will continue to receive charges for any systems still provisioned within Quantum during any wind-down or transitional phase and you must finish paying for the month you are already in.

It can take some time to transfer services out to a new provider so please allow sufficient time for migration as your services will need to continue to operate during the migration process and you will be charged for all systems that are still operational in any given month.

Please note that Tribe cannot cancel internet services that you have migrated in from an existing provider, you will have to liaise directly with your provider to cancel those services, or have any new Cloud provider assist with migrating the services if compatible with your new service.