Download PDF
Reliability, convenience and cost: 3 primary reasons SME chose Linode
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
SME initially faced two significant hurdles with regards to its hosted deployment of the Enterprise File Fabric. First, its SaaS platform demands constant uptime and high throughput, so SME sought the capability to balance traffic loads for its clients. Second, for some of its enterprise customers, SME needed to supply on-demand dedicated IaaS instances that could assume the advantages of its Enterprise File Fabric Appliance without requiring the client’s investing heavily in new technology or advanced system administration training, but which would remain cost effective. More recently, SME has sought to automate its client on-boarding for an IaaS instance.
About The Customer
Storage Made Easy (SME) is a London-based company founded in 2009, specializing in cloud-based storage solutions. The company offers the Enterprise File Fabric, a solution that enables IT departments to regain control of 'cloud sprawl' by unifying private and public data into a single, converged storage infrastructure. This infrastructure can be easily managed and used to set governance and audit controls. SME's solution provides a 'blanket' that enterprises can apply to wrap around all their data, whether it’s on-premises, within a public cloud, or on a third-party software vendor’s cloud. Customers use SME for collaboration, security, encryption, audit, and control, as well as to provide a data unification platform. The company has seen increased subscriptions from Fortune 1000 enterprises and has expanded its market adoption of the Enterprise File Fabric Solution.
The Solution
Linode’s nine global datacenters let SME load balance its clients across global regions. This geographic disparity reduces the risk of their SaaS offering going offline for any length of time. For customers who require a hosted cloud instance, SME also chooses to recommend Linode hosting as an option to its Enterprise File Fabric customers. This 'managed private appliance' appeals to customers that seek the benefits of SME’s Enterprise File Fabric Appliance, but don’t have the technology, or administrative know-how to be able to confidently master an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. More recently, SME has begun the process of automating customer on-boarding to acquire a Linode IaaS instance. Soon, SME will be launching a one-click deployment feature rooted in Linode automation through its API.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
UBM plc: Taking the pulse of the business and engaging employees with a far-reaching strategic transformation
UBM, a leading global events business, was undergoing a significant strategic transformation named 'Events First'. As part of this transformation, the company was preparing to complete the largest acquisition in its history - Advanstar, a US-based events and marketing services business valued at more than USD970m. The company faced the risk of human capital flight if it was unable to effectively engage top talent with the new strategic direction. UBM needed to make significant structural, process and systems changes, uniting its previously autonomous regional businesses. The challenge was to ensure all of its employees were engaged and aligned with the new future vision.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Wittmann EDV-Systeme launches IT monitoring services
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
