IT Infrastructure Service Company Silicon Sky Customer of Infinidat InfiniBox

Founded in 2009, Silicon Sky is a specialist IT infrastructure service company with offices in South Africa, the UK  and the US. The organisation has customers across all 3 countries and also offers its services throughout the African continent. Silicon Sky specialises in (IaaS including compute, network, storage, security, backup and DR hosted in 3 data centres in South Africa and one in USA. With enterprise-grade managed cloud platforms co-located in multiple carrier neutral data centres – high performance, HA and reliable storage are critical components of the company’s service offering.

Growth of IaaS heightens requirement for simplified data management
Silicon Sky has seen exponential growth in its IaaS business over the last 3 years, as cloud-based infrastructure gained impetus in the local market. As the IaaS offering grew, the company’s previous storage solution was unable to keep pace with the scalability it required.

The multiple storage tiers added complexity as it created disparate service levels and did not offer a truly multi-tenant environment. Moreover, for Silicon Sky to meet the performance demands from customers, the organisation had to frequently move its customers systems and data from HDDs onto SSD storage. Not only did this require a manual migration process that impacted the customer, but there was also a cost implication too. This compelled the organisation to seek an alternative solution.

Said Brenton Halsted, MD, Silicon Sky, said: “The nature of our IaaS offering means we have to manage a variety of storage tiers for our clients, and our existing solution did not cater to a multi-tenant environment, resulting in frustrations and creating complexities. As our business grew, this became more of an issue. The InfiniBox enterprise storage system was the panacea to these pains, providing us with a single tier of storage giving all our customers the faster speeds and capacity required with our IaaS service.“

InfiniBox boosts performance, reduces cost
Silicon Sky had several requirements, including high speed response times, 100% availability and true multi-tenancy, which were vital considerations. Additionally, they needed a predictable cost per gigabyte to support the business’ IaaS offering.

“The InfiniBox storage array caters for petabyte scale storage at an impressive price. Furthermore, Infinidat’s unique architecture gives us unprecedented speeds at a cost that is almost comparable to spinning disk storage mediums. We also have N+2 redundancy and can effectively deliver the same performance to all of our customers while keeping their data completely segregated,” Halsted explained.

Simple implementation
Initially a single 500TB system was implemented in 2018, taking just a day to provision and integrate with the company’s existing environment. Setup was a simple process thanks to the preconfigured nature of the InfiniBox disk array. Silicon Sky worked closely with Infinidat to ensure a seamless process.

Following the success of this initial installation, additional InfiniBox storage arrays were added in the 2 years that followed. Silicon Sky now has a number of InfiniBox storage arrays, providing access topetabytes of storage capacity with the option to add more as the company’s storage requirements continue to expand.

“When Silicon Sky first engaged with us, we agreed to a flexible Operating Expense (OpEx) model to make the solution more appealing. This enabled us to demonstrate the benefits of the InfiniBox system without an upfront investment. As a result, Silicon Sky purchased additional storage arrays outright,” said Hayden Sadler, country manager for South Africa, Infinidat.

Zero compromise storage increases customer experience
The InfiniBox storage arrays also deliver HA and great redundancy through triple redundancy controller, effectively supporting Silicon Sky’s IaaS business. The company benefits from zero compromise storage with a system that delivers performance and reliability, providing a competitive edge in a growing market.

“Our customers noticed the difference immediately, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. In the IaaS market, it’s all about price and performance and Infinidat gives us both. We will continue to use Infinidat’s products as and when we need additional capacity,” Halsted concluded.