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Once upon a time, California-based cloud hosting company, Pay Per Cloud (PPC), had been a public data centre hosting company; PPC was eventually carved out as a separate business unit and a focused brand.
Tony Underwood, current EVP and CMO of Pay Per Cloud, used to be a consumer of its SaaS offerings and managed services, and had been around to see PPC emerge before ultimately joining. ”After I exited my previous company, I joined forces with (PPC) to move the cloud because I saw the cloud as a significant change in the way that businesses are going to conduct businesses.
“Things were done as customers needed them, and then when I realised where the demand was going, we built an offering specifically for that.”
Drastic changes happened two years ago, after the recognition that there was this need to change. “The upgrade to the Brocade environment was about a year ago,” explained Underwood.
“It (transformed) from ageing infrastructure that doesn’t seem like it’s ageing, or shouldn’t have been ageing, but was because of demands customers were placing on it. (It was ageing because it) wasn’t able to scale or grow.”
The road ahead
From a public cloud hosting company, PPC is now an enterprise-class, highly-available cloud infrastructure. They also have managed services wrapped around IaaS, SaaS to allow SMB customers implement tech solutions in the cloud or tie it to on-premise solutions so they can have a hybrid solution.
“We look for customers who have a distributed workforce or multiple offices, or just an infrastructure on premise that is not enterprise-level ie. server sitting in a closet, and they need to have it sitting in an environment that is highly-available and scalable.”
PPC is also in the mission-critical space, offering high availability email, a core service that usually cannot afford any downtime.
“Our environment is substantially stronger with high-availability infrastructure and 24-hours monitoring.” These are ‘luxuries’ that small business oft times can’t afford and Underwood added, “So, they move to us and get cloud and management monitoring which is a critical component.”
Things turn technical…
Granted, there were very specific things PPC demanded of its data centre’s Ethernet architecture, to be able to offer the services that they do.
Jason Nolet, VP of Brocade’s data centre networking group explained, “The first was to upgrade from a 1GbE connectivity solution to a 10GbEconnectivity solution, from the server to top of rack. Second was increasing the density of the servers in DC, but more importantly virtual machine density. The third was being able to introduce a new technology like VCS fabrics without significant disruption to its customer base.”
Underwood said, “A few reasons we put a VDX (Ethernet fabric switch) solution in place was because we had technology that wasn’t able to scale. We were sitting on a 1GbE environment, we had capacity and growth demands imposed on our ageing infrastructure causing a bottleneck for the company. There was no way we could meet our customers’ or our business’s growth demands with our old technology.”
“We had to go through a controlled process to make sure we migrated into our environment without impacting customers. Brocade was great in helping us do that.”
Tech considerations
Underwood shared that from 8 servers in a rack, they were able to increase density to 12 servers, as well as also increase the number of VMs in the environment – from over a hundred to 540. “That’s a substantial increase in capacity.”
Besides the substantial ROI, there is also growth to consider. With all the experience that PPC had already gathered being in the industry that they are in, they are very much on the ball about the trends that they need to ready themselves for – mobility and scalability.
With so much modern technology at their disposal, capacity bottlenecks should be a thing of the past.
Pay Per Cloud knows this and Underwood said, “Any tech that a company implements, you have to have some vision of how you are going to scale that. So we’ve looked and saw this tech can help us grow for our next 3 to 4 year growth plans.”
More Brocade press and analyst 2012 briefing reports by EITN:
Cat Yong is Editor-in-Chief of Enterprise IT News, a regional news website which began in Malaysia circa 2011. A common theme in all of her work - opinions, analysis, features and more - is how technology and innovation drives business and outcomes.
A career tech journalist for 22 years, her work has evolved to also encompass narratives of tech powering human potential.
