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Datacenter Services choose Apache CloudStack to deliver enterprise grade public IaaS cloud

Part of the CSN Group, DATACENTER Services believes that IT parties do not want to invest in IT Infrastructure. It is too expensive in terms of cash and knowledge. Therefore they offer ‘low level’ IT services:

  1. CompanyCloud IaaS
  2. CompanyCloud On-line backup tooling and storage
  3. Company-Box, the secure alternative for DropBox

All of them are white labelled and true pay-per-use. Customers are IT Service providers, Independent Software Vendors and IT departments of larger Companies.

Business situation

DATACENTER Services set about choosing an orchestration platform to underpin their public IaaS offering, as Cees Doets (Director) explained “We needed an IaaS platform that was enterprise grade, fast to deploy and would enable us to offer the sort of service levels that our customers expect. We evaluated a number of options, both open source and proprietary, and CloudStack stood out as meeting all of our requirements.”

Cees Doets, Director
Cees Doets, Director

DATACENTER Services had originally deployed an early propriety version of Cloudstack back in 2010. “Since our initial deployment, we had been following the amazing development of CloudStack by the Apache software community and decided that we wanted to benefit from the open standards offered by the community,” said Cees. “We revaluated the IaaS market in and identified that Apache CloudStack really was the most mature, stable and easiest to deploy solution available. So, we set about updating our environment to use this open-source technology.

“CloudStack is a complete solution that includes all the features we needed for an IaaS cloud. It allows us to manage the cloud with an easy-to-use Web interface, command line tools, and a full-featured API.”

The solution

“We chose Apache CloudStack as our orchestration platform as it allowed us to deliver expertise-grade IaaS to our customers and also allow us to gain the benefits and flexibility of an open source technology,” said Cees.

DATACENTER Services worked with ShapeBlue, the leading CloudStack integrator. “They reviewed our project plan and made some suggestions as to how we could improve the installation process,” said Cees. “As a result the build was very smooth. Again ShapeBlue proved to be a true sparring partner for us.”

Benefits

Cees summarised, “One of the key elements for our choice is the multitenant environment. We can draw a very clear line of responsibilities between our customers, their customers and us.

“By design this is much more secure than alternatives. Also it is highly scalable and most important, it works, right out of the box. Since moving to CloudStack, we have experienced 100% uptime.”

With CloudStack now underpinning their IaaS offering, DATACENTER Services have all the benefits of  an open source platform but with great support from ShapeBlue. “When there is a problem, we pick up the phone to them and get an answer immediately,” said Cees. “They are extremely professional and knowledgeable about CloudStack and as a result we are involving them in new projects such as replacing our existing cloud rack and 3D-CAD in the cloud.

“The change to open source was a new experience for us, but with ShapeBlue supporting us we know we can get advice to carry out additional tasks like programming, if required,” concluded Cees.

 

 

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