Irish-owned Digital Planet describes itself as an enterprise cloud services provider, offering an infrastructure-as-a-service solution to enterprises large and small, both within Ireland and overseas. But, in reality, it is a little more complicated than that.
In an industry dominated by global players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, what led a traditional Irish IT managed-services provider to think it could compete successfully in the emerging cloud market?
It was not borne out of some idealistic plan of taking on the giants of the tech world at their own game and winning, according to Digital Planet's Joe Brady. The company's chief technology officer (CTO) said it resulted from their identifying obvious weaknesses in the cloud services that were being provided at the time, which were preventing larger organisations from adopting these services.
While cloud facilitates the approach of global offerings, the sheer scale of these organisations meant that they had to largely commoditise their offerings. Digital Planet saw a gap in the emerging cloud market that was preventing their enterprise customers from embracing cloud services.
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HIGHER UPTIME LEVELS
They needed a cloud solution that actually delivered what everyone said cloud would deliver, but which in reality usually fell short. This included: higher levels of security; better performance than internal environments; improved levels of support; higher levels of uptime; and easier access to systems.
Some of the potential advantages of moving from internal IT to a cloud environment are obvious, but the issue faced by many customers was that the current cloud offerings, while useful for software development and test environments, were not suitable for enterprises to provide their business-critical production infrastructure.
Of course, the ability to load balance services across many continents can probably still be best provided by global players. Often, however, the largest cloud providers still do not have sufficiently high uptime or performance for most corporate systems.
“We envisaged a solution whereby we could offer our customers a platform that would perform as well as, or better than, an in-house deployment and have a higher uptime,” said Brady. “A service-level agreement of 99.9 per cent is not acceptable for most business – the famous ‘five nines’ is the target, while four [equating to 99.99 per cent uptime] is the absolute minimum. That’s less than one hour per year of unplanned downtime.”
Providing this kind of service meant taking a different approach from the global providers. Rather than large arrays of low-end equipment, where a certain amount of failure is acceptable and even expected, Brady said that Digital Planet based itself on the premise that no downtime would ever be acceptable. “This meant designing a platform for resilience and only using the best of breed technologies in every area of the design,” he added.
CONSULTATIVE ENGAGEMENTS
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Joe Brady, Digital Planet[/caption]
Digital Planet’s cloud offering is primarily built on a stack of HP, 3PAR, Cisco and VMware technologies and customers are supported through the design and migration process by a senior team of technical architects. “That’s probably our biggest differentiator – our engagements are consultative led rather than self-service,” according to the CTO.
Utilising cloud servers, networks and storage increases agility while reducing the time and expense required by customers to build and maintain traditional physical environments. It also puts the effort of ensuring the network and systems are well designed and secure into the hands of IT specialists.
“I think that the key to our success to date is our ability to design solutions that meet the specific requirements of our clients,” he continued. “We typically perform a capacity-planning exercise on the current client production environment to identify pressure points and applications that require higher levels of resources. We then design the solution to best meet these requirements.
“The critical differentiator for us is that once a client moves to our cloud, they experience equivalent or higher levels of performance to that achieved by their internal systems. We create the journey to the cloud and manage the client experience on every step,” Brady said.
Of course, like every technology provider, the company faces issues and has to work hard to ensure that any problems do not affect its customers. “In some ways, it was easy at the beginning, where we were basically replicating a solution similar to those which we had already installed for dozens of customers. But it wasn’t long before we achieved a scale larger than any of our customers.
“This does occasionally lead to challenges in ensuring that we never hit any bottlenecks and it has given us a new appreciation of capacity-planning tools and methodologies. There are also now a lot more moving parts in the whole solution to be kept in synch with each other.”
On-demand capacity allows customers to quickly respond to new business opportunities, seasonal or cyclical trends and other fluctuations in the need for compute capacity in an agile and flexible way. This can mean that it can sometimes be difficult to forecast growth.
Due to expansion that exceeded the company’s own forecasts, Digital Planet has undertaken a series of upgrade projects to ensure that customers always have as much flexibility as they would ever require. Recently, it launched a new cloud node, which provides for expansion capacity for up to another 10,000 VMs. “This should buy us time to focus more on new services and markets,” said Brady.
RELIABLE CLOUD SERVICES
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Customers want to be PCI compliant[/caption]
In the early days, it was enough to provide reliable cloud servers. Now, however, that is becoming just the most basic step on the way to providing highly functional systems to customers.
In the last few months, the most common new requests received by Digital Planet relate to:
- Visibility into the cloud;
- Security requirements evolving more frequently into compliance requirements;
- Service automation and Dev-Ops, a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT professionals.
“Customers are looking for transparent visibility into all aspects of their cloud environment,” according to Brady. “While we’ve always provided this information through different applications, we’ve now developed a new user portal where all information is immediately available at a glance.
“In the coming months, everything from system health, performance and server management to support tickets, account information and contracts will be available to all of our customers through a simple dashboard.”
Compliance is becoming more prevalent issue also – more customers with an online presence are looking to implement security standards such as ISO27001 and payment card industry (PCI) compliance. As a result, they are looking to ensure that their cloud providers also meet these standards.
“We’ve have committed a lot of time to ensuring that we exceed these requirements and, to demonstrate this to our customers, we’ve achieved ISO27001 certification for all services. We’re also currently undertaking a process to achieve PCI validation for our own platform,” he said.
INTELLIGENT SYSTEM AUTOMATION
In a separate area, many more users are looking for intelligent system automation, in the CTO’s experience. “This is still very much a developing area and can vary in what it looks like, but it can include automated network deployments achieved via software defined networking and application automation,” he said.
“It’s fascinating what you can achieve with orchestration tools such as vCentre Orchestrator and configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef – it opens up many possibilities. These kinds of tools not only allow for real elastic scaling of cloud resources, but can also be used to formulate a software-driven solution to many issues facing customers, as long as the desired action can be fully defined.
So, what comes next for the cloud services sector? Expectations are constantly evolving, one year’s differentiating new feature is the next year’s basic requirement and the focus is moving up the technology stack.
“In an industry where staying still is moving backwards, you always have to be looking out for new developments to maintain momentum in the marketplace,” said Brady.
“There’s no doubt but that it’s interesting to work in this part of the cloud. From one quarter to another, we find ourselves investigating or designing very different solutions as new customer requirements emerge or new technology emerges. But it’s also challenging; we need to keep on top of every new development in the market and constantly balance between delivering the latest services and maintaining the stability on which our customers depend.”