EarthLink Private Cloud Hosting Enables Businesses to Maintain Control of Customized Virtual IT Environment

ATLANTA, Oct. 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EarthLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK),  a leading IT and communications provider, today announced the launch of its new Private Cloud Hosting service to address the increasing challenges faced by businesses when procuring and managing their IT infrastructure. EarthLink Private Cloud Hosting addresses the increasing preference many businesses express for moving their on-premises hardware or virtualized environment to the cloud, yet retaining management via a single interface with the ability to control security and privacy policies. Private Cloud Hosting also supports the scalability for larger numbers of Virtual Machines (VMs) and the need for a private environment, with EarthLink providing the dedicated resources.

The College Network, a pioneer in the online education industry, has deployed EarthLink's Private Cloud solution to run its core business applications, including its customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning, content delivery and customer registration systems. "With EarthLink Private Cloud Hosting, we have significantly upgraded our infrastructure and availability of mission-critical systems, which makes people more efficient, processes easier, data availability higher and customer satisfaction better," said Ryan Sallee, CIO for The College Network. "This implementation was a huge win for our company, as you can't put a price on the systems availability. That's the value of an IT services provider, and with EarthLink—I sleep better at night."

Customer benefits of a Private Cloud Hosting solution include reduced IT costs and complexity. Private Cloud Hosting helps customers more easily respond to changing business requirements by enabling them to extend their on-premises virtualized private environment to the cloud, and to manage their entire virtualized environment through a single interface to maximize resource utilization and efficiency.

Another key benefit of the Private Cloud Hosting solution is its built-in business continuity and disaster recovery protection. Private Cloud Hosting features include N+1 redundancy in a self-healing cloud architecture, automatic server failover, high-availability SAN storage,  hosting in geographically diverse SSAE 16 SOC2 certified data centers, and a nationwide private MPLS network.  EarthLink Private Cloud also includes VMware vCenter for centralized management and control across the unified on-premises and cloud IT environment. vCenter includes complete visibility with customizable dashboards, real-time performance and capacity analytics.

"In our discussions with IT leaders about what they need, many express a common desire to take advantage of the incredible efficiencies inherent in Cloud virtualization, but still want to maintain visibility and control over their IT infrastructure," said Michael D. Toplisek, EarthLink Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "Private Cloud Hosting offers hands-on control for organizations that want and need that environment to better manage growth, control security and data privacy and meet compliance requirements."

EarthLink's next generation Cloud infrastructure is powered by Cisco UCS server hardware and Cisco gigabit networking equipment in an N+1 architecture in the company's SSAE 16 SOC2 certified data centers. EarthLink's next generation Cloud supports a wide range of operating systems, including 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux virtual machines that can be hosted simultaneously.

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About EarthLink
EarthLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK)  is a leading IT services and communications provider to more than 150,000 businesses and one million consumers nationwide. EarthLink empowers customers with managed services including cloud computing, managed and private cloud, and virtualization services such as managed hosting and cloud workspace. EarthLink also offers a robust portfolio of IT security, application hosting, colocation and IT support services. The company operates an extensive network spanning 29,421 route fiber miles with 90 metro fiber rings and 8 secure data centers providing ubiquitous nationwide data and voice IP service coverage across more than 90 percent of the country. Founded in 1994, EarthLink's award-winning reputation for outstanding service and product innovation is supported by an experienced team of professionals focused on best-in-class customer care.  For more information, visit EarthLink's website at www.earthlink.com.

SOURCE EarthLink, Inc.