CloudSigma Achieves 15% Gross Margin Increase

Challenge

For the most part, they were using an internal product which they developed out of frustration with the other vendors they were working with. These vendors over promised on performance, their solutions were too expensive, and their teams were not providing adequate operational support.

The CloudSigma operations and development teams were overtasked with storage related problems, as well as, managing their main cloud service. When they selected StorPool with firm’s fully managed services, they were able to reduce their investment on internal resources for day-to-day management and storage development. Relying on the StorPool storage experts, the company was able to refocus their resources on their core business.

Deployment
It has 19 locations around the world and a number of new locations in the pipeline, which makes its case more complex. It was looking for flexibility in the deployment model allowing them to tailor the storage solution to the specific requirements of every location. It tailored the storage to specific facility parameters and requirements at every location providing CloudSigma with an optimized system across all locations.

StorPool’s storage solution integrated seamlessly with the networking and computing pieces. For instance, in Zurich, Switzerland, the largest cloud of CloudSigma, StorPool was deployed in a semi-converged setup which combines converged all-SSD nodes (running both applications and storage) with separate storage-only HDD nodes. In other locations where the power density is lower the optimal setup is different and in that case they use a fully converged setup. For a cloud provider, the storage is a system which cannot be taken down, even for maintenance, because it’s impossible to coordinate thousands of customers regarding downtime.

Infrastructure
StorPool is deployed in all 19 operating CloudSigma locations and is being rolled-out in more locations under development WW. The typical setup starts with a minimum of 3 standard servers, a mixture of SSD and spinning-disk drives and a redundant 10Gb/s network. In most cases, the architecture is hyper-converged or where datacenter parameters allow it – semi-converged. CloudSigma uses the KVM hypervisor and a proprietary cloud management system, with StorPool being integrated through a JSON API allowing CloudSigma to control their storage, alongside all other systems from a single pane.

Results
Robert Jenkins, CEO, CloudSigma, sums up the results: “By using StorPool we achieved over a 15% increase in our gross margin and that is huge for a service provider. To be able to increase our gross margin by adopting a new storage system and at the same time increase performance significantly, that’s really a major change. From a commercial perspective after adopting StorPool we’ve been able to achieve a much more efficient fabric that’s allowing us to sell more services on the same hardware. So we increased our gross margin, we’ve increased performance, we’ve reduced customer churn. We are very happy and finally we can say that the liaison we have had with StorPool has been excellent. We’ve been very happy with the reactions of the operational team both in terms of managing the solution and expanding it but also in terms of dealing with issues and working together. We found StorPool to be a great partner in terms of our service delivery.”

More on storpool.com
StorPool Storage is a provider of fast and effortless block storage software on the market. Its enterprise solution is used by public and private cloud builders, enterprises, MSPs, SaaS, hosting and cloud providers. It comes as a software, plus a fully-managed storage service that converts sets of standard servers into fast, HA and scalable shared-storage systems.

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