MANAGED SERVICES cloud
ecommerce supply chain for European teams. The cloud also enables the rapid creation and modification of test servers for specific short-term requirements. The flexible cloud infrastructure service provided by Vnetrix means that the music company can now manage these high demands and the unpredictable volumes of the music industry. Another customer, Atkins Global, a leading engineering and design consultancy, is using the CA AppLogic platform from Vnetrix to provide hosted Geospatial solutions based on its CIRRUSmaps™ platform, a Web mapping platform.
By standardising on the CA AppLogic platform, Vnetrix is tackling this situation head on: quickly provisioning, deploying, and managing complete cloud applications and the supporting infrastructure for customers worldwide. Most importantly, the MSP now has the flexibility to respond to new market opportunities, while increasing the efficiency of its resources and operations. The benefit of the CA AppLogic platform is that once the cloud is built and ready, new servers can literally be deployed in anything from minutes to a few hours. There is no need to order new servers or to go through a whole new build process, customers can simply drag and drop.
The user-friendly GUI provides an intuitive way to define infrastructure, provision applications and servers as well as monitor operations-using only a browser.
Rob Norman adds: “AppLogic allows us to deliver an individual service to each of our customers. This is thanks to the service flexibility the platform provides, and the capability we have to design, deploy and text complex setups rapidly. Alongside these strengths, AppLogic gives us and our customers the ability to migrate to new cloud setups from traditional dedicated hosting.” And for the Vnetrix’s customers, there are plenty of benefits, whether it’s for the likes of Universal Music and Atkins as mentioned above, or other companies such as Omega Pharma, which is running a cloud supporting a public website and CRM consumer application. Rob Norman explains: “Customers are enjoying a range of benefits including reduced service delivery costs with the reduced requirement for dedicated servers; lower data centre costs; fast speed of deployment; easy scale on demand; and the ability to consume short term solutions.”
“The private cloud solutions from Vnetrix have provided us with the flexibility to rapidly build new infrastructures whilst keeping overall operational costs lower,” says Martin Ford-Whyte, Associate Director at Atkins. David Moggs, Ecommerce Development Director, Universal Music Group International adds: “High demands and the unpredictable nature of the music industry needed a flexible infrastructure. The cloud solution from Vnetrix delivered that.”
“CA Technologies revolutionary cloud platform enables Vnetrix to deliver differentiated cloud services” says Justine Harris, director of Cloud Solutions, CA Technologies. “The CA AppLogic platform eliminates a major obstacle in accessing true cloud computing technology: the binding of software to hardware. This allows Vnetrix to deploy and scale customer applications without changing code and architecture so that the company can rapidly deliver IaaS and PaaS solutions.” Designed for MSPs and innovative enterprises, the CA AppLogic application-centric cloud platform allows users to turn an application and the infrastructure that supports it into a single manageable object. After visually drawing the objects once, they can
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be scaled and replicated or migrated quickly to another data center in response to the changing needs of the business. The result enables users to achieve greater agility, scalability, ease-of-use and cost efficiency in cloud computing than was previously possible.
The future
Looking ahead, Rob Norman is looking to expand the use of CA technology within the Vnetrix infrastructure, based on the positive experience of using AppLogic. He says: “We have now been working with CA Technologies since the middle of 2010 and they have been an excellent partner, totally focused on our success and giving us the support we need. AppLogic was a key part of our strategic decision to offer cloud services to new and existing clients. The cloud services form the basis of our decision to offer more flexible infrastructures across our various data centres worldwide.”
During 2012, Vnetrix is looking to further develop its presence in the service provider space, as Norman outlines: “We are investing in increased hosting capacity in the US in our Los Angeles data centre based on client demands. We are very excited about the opportunities the US market provides for us and for our clients. We have a number of UK clients that would like to use us as a single source supplier for hosting in the UK and US. In addition we will be investing in additional hosting capacity in the UK to keep up with the current demands. Cloud services will form a key part of our strategy however we will continue to invest in our other remote managed services and user support, as these have been extremely successful for us.”
Norman concludes: “My advice to anyone involved in the Cloud space would be to keep talking to your clients to understand what they really need. I know this sounds obvious but cloud is not for everyone, which is why we are continuing to maintain other wide range of options for clients. We believe that cloud has a place in many businesses and what it looks like in each one might be very different. For that reason, we favour private clouds as being a great flexible option for clients to consider.”
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