Customers
Belgacom
Belgacom uses the Dacentec D-rack for offering volume cloud solutions
Belgacom needs a scalable, reliable and cost-effective cloud infrastructure solution to serve the Belgian SMB market, ISVs and segments of the corporate cloud market. Belgacom relies on Dacentec D-rack to deliver this raw cloud infrastructure capacity.
Introduction
Belgacom is the incumbent and leading Belgian telecom provider, listed on the Euronext Brussels stock exchange. Belgacom offers both fixed and mobile services, with a strong focus on the Belgian market which consists of roughly 4.7 million households, 840k SMEs (<200 employees) and 2k corporations (>200 employees). Belgacom’s Enterprise Business Unit (EBU) delivers fixed, mobile and ICT products and services to professional customers. The EBU has the unique selling proposition of providing full convergent solutions whereas competitors are rather fragmented and offer point solutions. Belgacom’s EBU sees cloud computing as a way to deliver remote content and applications through a convergence of IT and telecoms. It is Belgacom’s ambition to strengthen its leadership in converged telecom solutions and become the local leader in cloud based services in Belgium. Belgacom’s EBU wants to offer applications to any device over any network, by leveraging the Belgacom datacenter infrastructure, networking capabilities and direct and indirect sales channels. This allows Belgacom to deliver true end-to-end solutions secured through SLAs and delivered close to customers via an unrivalled channel mix.
The Challenge
Against this background, Belgacom launched a project with the mission to deliver a volume cloud solution offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service and Desktop-as-a-Service with a focus on SMB customers, ISVs and segments of the corporate cloud market. From a market positioning perspective, the project had the ambition to allow Belgacom to effectively compete with foreign cloud providers on the Belgian market. It was key for Belgacom that suppliers were able to deliver a scalable cloud solution that matched the reputation of Belgacom as a reliable partner for enterprises, and at the same time allowed Belgacom to enter the volume cloud market with an offer that was competitive with that of major Internet cloud providers. Time-to-market was another key decision criterion for Belgacom.
The Dacentec D-rack solution
Dacentec was chosen as the preferred partner for this Belgacom cloud project. Dacentec delivered its D-rack, a disruptive, turnkey, cloud infrastructure solution comprising compute, networking, caching, storage, power and infrastructure management. The D-rack integrates with a multi-tenant cloud management software solution provided by the company Awingu. The D-rack solution was selected above alternative market offers because of a number of reasons. The D-rack fulfilled the need of fast time-to-market, as it is a real turnkey solution that integrates all aspects of a cloud infrastructure. This lowered project and integration costs and led to a shorter timeframe between contract agreement and roll-out. The out-of-the-box integration with the Awingu cloud management software allows for a seamless user experience from initial provisioning to the actual deployment of the cloud services. Secondly, the D-rack provides a disruptive architectural approach for volume cloud solutions, leading to a cost model that is in-line with what is needed to serve the targeted market segments. The self-healing nature of the D-rack, its end-to-end management capabilities, lights-out management and proactive power monitoring further lead to an optimization of recurring costs and lower TCO compared to other alternatives. Furthermore, the D-rack storage accelerator technology enhances storage performance to cope with demanding virtualized workloads. The Belgacom volume cloud offering is expected to go live in Q2 2012.
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Zenith Infotech
Zenith Infotech is an international company that specializes in delivering innovative business continuity and cloud computing solutions for IT service providers. Its U.S. headquarters is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.