CASE STUDY | CALLIGO
The cloud will never be the same again. Calligo changes everything by launching the first SolidFire infrastructure.
Calligo at a glance With headquarters in the Channel Islands, Calligo is a pureplay cloud service provider. They specialize in delivering highly efficient cloud services to a wide range of clients from small business to global enterprises. The common thread across their entire customer base is the need for sophisticated IT capabilities regardless of size. Client workloads range from various financial and offshore-centric applications to the large bursty demands of online gaming. Each service that Calligo provides allows customers to capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing while still adhering to the data residency and jurisdictional regulations that mandate customer data cannot leave the island.
Their challenge: Eliminate noisy neighbors and guarantee high performance for all customers A main challenge for Calligo has been the inability to eliminate the effects of “noisy neighbors” within their shared storage infrastructures. To cost effectively reach a broader range of customer applications, Calligo needed a greater degree of control and predictability around the storage performance they delivered to customer workloads. Until now, Calligo has been using storage technology that wasn’t designed for the challenges presented by high-performance applications deployed within a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. Dissatisfied with the restrictions of legacy storage architectures, Calligo scrutinized their options before making a final storage decision.
Calligo chose SolidFire as the basis for their IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms because the system is architected specifically for cloud infrastructures. With SolidFire at the core of their platform, Calligo now delivers the SLA-backed performance demanded by their customers, while achieving the scale, efficiency and environmental benefits that are best aligned with their business model.
Building a more robust cloud portfolio As the only complete cloud service provider in the Channel Islands, Calligo’s cloud computing portfolio is purpose-built to satisfy the needs of offshoring customers. Calligo has tailored their cloud infrastructure and services to meet the unique demands of these customers.
“With SolidFire, we don’t have to worry about our underlying infrastructure having to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, just to service a disk throughput issue.”
CloudCore is Calligo’s IaaS offering that delivers raw virtual machines in a pay-as-you-go model. Customers can consume CloudCore within on-premise, hybrid, private, and multitenant configurations. Additional services available on top of this platform include desktop-as-a-service, disaster recovery, document management, web hosting, a Cloud Foundry powered PaaS solution, and various SaaS-based offerings (e.g. SugarCRM). Seizing a competitive advantage The team at Calligo has been delivering virtualized and cloud-based infrastructure offerings for a number of years in various capacities. Over this period, they have built a strong reputation around innovation and quality-of-service. The decision to proactively seek out leading technology vendors that could satisfy the performance, operational resiliency and flexibility requirements of the offshore business community has continued to build upon this reputation. Calligo differentiates service to their customers by delivering an agile cloud infrastructure that maintains compliance with local data residency and data protection mandates. Calligo’s proven methodology ensures that customers can transform their business to a cloud-based model with confidence. Calligo offers a blend of tools and consultancy services to ensure complete alignment among application requirements, data residency restrictions, and critical business processes.
– Julian Box, CEO, Calligo
Launching an infrastructure fueled by SolidFire Calligo considered many factors before choosing the SolidFire storage solution, including the tangible impact this decision would have on their cost model and growth plans. The most significant criteria included: • A simplified infrastructure. SolidFire’s ability to dynamically provision and control performance allowed Calligo to completely change the way they designed their cloud platform. SolidFire’s solution to the noisy-neighbor problem enabled Calligo to host multiple services from a single shared storage infrastructure. Armed with a storage system that could match the flexibility and agility of the rest of their infrastructure, Calligo was able to dramatically simplify their back-end systems down to a common set of compute, network and storage resources. Now Calligo can carve up and dynamically provisions these resources to meet the demands of small to large customers. • Performance without over-provisioning. With such precise control over the allocation of performance resources within the SolidFire cluster, Calligo can guarantee customers the performance they need without costly over-provisioning. This
“SolidFire is enabling us to create a much more granular approach to our service offerings so we can provide a utility-based model to our clients at a price point that other service providers have not been able to match. SolidFire is giving us a competitive edge.” – Julian Box, CEO, Calligo
is a win for both parties – customers gain confidence from guaranteed performance while Calligo avoids unnecessary investments in underutilized storage. By rightsizing storage resources allocated to each customer, Calligo can also remove the burden of stretching out contract lengths to cover the cost of an over-inflated storage footprint.
the SSDs coupled with the data reduction efficiencies of the system were a powerful combination to reduce the carbon footprint of Calligo’s cloud. This advantage also delivered a convincing selling tool for Calligo’s environmentally conscious customers as they benchmark against what they could achieve in their on-premise IT environments.
• Accounting system integration. Beyond greater control over storage performance, the SolidFire APIs provided a robust dashboard of metrics on system usage across both performance and capacity. By integrating this capability into their accounting systems, Calligo can offer a true utility-based pricing model based on hourly, daily or monthly usage. Over time, these controls can be exposed to Calligo’s customers through a self-service interface, allowing them to dial storage resources up and down as needed.
• Alignment with growth plans. Continued growth is an imperative for Calligo, like every other cloud provider in this complex and crowded market. To keep pace with growth objectives, Calligo needed the ability to add SaaS offerings onto their CloudCore platform quickly and efficiently. With SolidFire, Calligo avoids adding siloed or dedicated storage infrastructure for each new application they bring to market. Independent control of capacity and performance ensured that new applications get the exact resources required.
• Pay-as-you-grow. Scale was an important consideration for Calligo as they continue to onboard new clients, grow existing customers, and enter new markets. Using SolidFire to linearly scale both capacity and performance by nondisruptively adding nodes to the cluster, Calligo can grow as their plans and customer demands dictate. This pay-as-yougrow approach directly matched the company’s expansion plans and cost model.
Enabling a more dynamic business
• Reduced cloud and data footprint. Since a large portion of their customer base includes legal and financial companies, Calligo continually faces considerable data storage requirements. With significant redundancy in their data set, they required a storage system that included deduplication capability that did not impact system performance. SolidFire’s inline deduplication capability was a critical component of the purchasing decision. The result was a reduced physical cloud footprint for Calligo and a reduced data footprint for their clients. • A minimized carbon footprint. Given the high cost of power, controlling space, power, and cooling costs is always a top priority. With solid state drives as the basis of the SolidFire architecture, Calligo reduced overall power consumption considerably. The environmental benefits recognized from
The benefits realized from deploying SolidFire at the base of their IaaS platform has a tangible impact on Calligo’s business. Increased flexibility along with consistent performance at the storage level has improved Calligo’s service quality while accelerating their time to market for new cloud services. At the same time, reductions in storage infrastructure cost directly translate to Calligo’s customers in the form of more favorable pricing.
As Calligo grows their business, the agility and price/performance advantages realized from the SolidFire system will provide them with a distinct competitive advantage that will, in turn, benefit their customers.
Discover more of what SolidFire can fuel for you. Contact us today and advance the way your customers use the cloud.
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