Category: Case Study

THE CHALLENGE

ASE had existing virtualization environments provided by VMware that weren’t adding value, decreasing available physical compute resources due to overhead VMware service addon-ons, and an over engineered licensing cost model that was always a nightmare to calculate  

ASE found there was a lack of innovation, particularly in relation to containerization and how the inevitable transition from VM to containers would happen. They stood back for a second and identified there were a lot of legacy features in the product that weren’t relevant to a modern architecture and bloat-ware.  

More and more of ASE’s customers were choosing hybrid and multi-cloud environments. They were bringing in an AWS or an Azure into their mix and the ability for them to easily orchestrate their connectivity, or the connectivity from OnPrem to the cloud, kept growing. ASE needed a new solution. 

OUTCOME

With Fluid in place, a large amount of time that ASE’s team would have spent doing rollouts and onboarding was cut down. Those resource savings can be passed on to the client or used to increase profit.  

With their previous infrastructure environment, ASE would be looking at potentially 2-3 days to onboard new customers. With Fluid, the ASE team can now onboard and deploy in just a couple minutes. A massive time and resource saving that’s allowed ASE to continue to focus on their client solutions, instead of getting that work done, and be able to pass on the cost savings to their clients. 

THE CHALLENGE

DSS was looking to scale out a proof-of-concept lab environment into a production enterprise-scale Filecoin deployment. This larger deployment required significantly more bandwidth between the computational and storage components of the solution.

There was also a requirement to ensure new computational hosts and storage capacity could be deployed simply and without significant human resources, whilst maintaining a 100% uptime state for the environment during change that resulted from scale.

OUTCOME

ASE installed Fluid, completing the networking component of DSS’s project in just one day. This networking project would usually take one to two weeks.

By utilising Fluid, DSS deployed its new footprint ready for scaling whilst taking advantage of advanced data centre networking concepts such as routing on host (ROH), BGP, Equal Cost MultiPath (ECMP) balancing as well as achieving the most possible bandwidth from their storage architecture. This has allowed for an increase in the production of proven storage capacity and consequently an increase in the amount of FIL (Filecoin) generated for the business.

Fluid makes networking simple and allows a high throughput data to flow from DSS’s servers to their storage infrastructure. The ability to maintain 100 gigabits and more across the entire network was a core element as networking is critical. Integrating Fluid into the solution improved DSS’s network performance considerably and provided them with increased productivity.

THE CHALLENGE

Ezypay’s business evolved to make more use of cloud services, particularly on Amazon Web Services (AWS). A requirement remained to continue existing colocated infrastructure, due to several compliance and operational reasons. It was critical to keep data close, out of the clouds, or available between multiple clouds.

The infrastructure that Ezypay had colocated comprised of VMware, an IBM SAN, and IBM Lenovo servers and continued for several years. Eventually, that came to an end of life where they had to migrate in some way, shape, or form.

Without a need for a full refresh, or to redeploy a VMware environment and traditional legacy SAN and server application environment, Fluid came into the picture as a solution.

OUTCOME

Ezypay has moved from an environment where they were using legacy infrastructure, with legacy backups and data management, through to implementing Fluid to be agile with how they go forward with their product enhancements and general technology operations as well.

Implementing Fluid has resulted in Ezypay being able to place more focus on their application and therefore their users, as opposed to maintaining legacy infrastructure. They had already started to see the benefits of doing that when they moved from their office out to Equinix, at the recommendation of ASE.

Next, ASE will retire their co-location. Ezypay has now consolidated an entire cabinet full of equipment down to about 2RUs of rack space, thanks to the solution Fluid has enabled.

By making data more open and accessible whilst maintaining protection and privacy, Ezypay will be able to accelerate its product development across any cloud and in any region where it operates.

The ability to manage the Fluid environment from within Cloud Manager has also resulted in exposure to other NetApp services such as Snapshot Control, as well as a range of other services, like Cloud Insights, that they can easily utilise from the same portal.