Reliable partner for high performance colocation and cloud solutions
Among the i3D.net team, leading the implementation of the Pure Storage solution, were two seasoned executives driving the company’s innovative business and technology strategies: Chief Commercial Officer Marco Boomsma and Chief Technology Officer Stefan Ideler. Since joining the company, Boomsma’s mission has been to form a high-performing commercial team, in order to take i3D.net’s service to the next level. “During the past 15 years, i3D.net has developed into a reliable partner for high-performance hosting, colocation and cloud solutions,” stated Boomsma. “We meet the high expectations of our customers by continuously optimizing our processes.
Our head office is located in Rotterdam, so it was an obvious choice for us to initially expand our business in the European market. Afterwards, we expanded to North America, but in recent years we are also seeing significant growth in upcoming markets such as Asia, Africa and South America. Currently, have 26 locations worldwide, on 6 continents.” For Ideler, performance and security are key. “Uptime, connectivity, and security — our core performance values — are becoming increasingly important to the enterprise market, which makes up 40% of our business,” said Ideler. “We are active mainly in the gaming industry. Our customers are some of the leading developers and publishers in the gaming market. But we also serve customers in other markets, including education, e-commerce health care and sports.”
Non-disruptive operations and performance, key for service level agreements
i3D.net currently serves 3,000 customers worldwide and is the global market leader for hosting publishers of online games — a multi-billion-euro industry. Customers enjoy a broad IaaS/Cloud portfolio hosted on 10,500 servers in 26 data centers across six continents. The data centers are connected to a high-speed fibre channel backbone in Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the United States. This network spans more than 120,000 kilometres and is connected to more than 2,000 peers on the world’s largest internet exchanges. According to Ideler, this infrastructure is i3D.net’s biggest unique selling point (USP). “
We are a global hosting company with a focus on performance, which is part of our DNA. What makes us so unique is that we have 26 linked server locations on six continents — more than any other hosting company. Low latency is critical for gaming. At the same time, more and more companies want to maintain a constant online presence, such as hosted telephony providers or e-commerce companies that run a 24/7 online store. Those companies also want minimal latency.” Ideler pointed to one of their international enterprise customers, who sought i3D. net’s help in migrating and renewing their IT-environment, which runs in one of our data centers.
This particular customer places high demands on networking, storage and applications. i3D.net covered the storage part together with Pure Storage and the customer is very satisfied with that collaboration. Their main requirement was low latency and the guarantee that this would remain low in all circumstances. “In i3D.net’s old IT environment, the latency could surpass 60 to 70 milliseconds for read/write operations. Now, the read/write latency never gets higher than 1 millisecond. That’s the guarantee Pure Storage offers,” added Ideler. According to Ideler, another great advantage of working with Pure Storage and Tectrade is their support in delivering a tailored solution.
Also, a demo system was quickly delivered to one of the i3D.net data centers, so they could start testing right away. “And we were able to do all this without any downtime, which was very important to our customer. Together with Pure Storage we successfully completed this project,” explained Ideler. “And with their four-hour parts replacement service, I don’t need to worry about components breaking down. Thanks to Pure Storage redundancy features, defect components won’t cause damage, but I also know that they will deliver a replacement within four hours.”
Increased agility and customer satisfaction with Pure Storage
Ideler also pointed to the dramatic decrease of i3D.net’s support workload and that of their customers, thanks to the user-friendly web portal, which shows exact requirements in real time. The Pure Storage support team proactively brings important issues to the forefront, allowing swift steps to prevent or resolve them. i3D.net’s previous Storage Area Management (SAM) provider was only interested in keeping the storage systems operating running. They were not interested in the status of the applications running on these systems. “Pure Storage however, will go the extra mile and tell us for instance, to hold off on upgrading some controllers, because they see that some of the systems are not configured redundantly.
They even suggest customer fixes,” commented Ideler. “We receive information about the applications, even though that actually wasn’t the responsibility of Pure Storage. But they just take that extra step in every scenario in order to ensure that your environment will continue to run smoothly.”
