NetEvidence bags greater flexibility with Claranet

NetEvidence relies on giving their clients continual visibility into their network and application behaviours. Once an enterprise network is connected to the service, Highlight collects real-time data 24/7, monitoring both the infrastructure and the applications and services that run over it. Both service provider and customer have instant views of what’s happening, using a browser, from anywhere. There’s no software to install and little or no hardware, as most of the data comes from existing devices.

The challenge
Highlight collects a solid, continuous stream of data, in real-time, from tens of thousands of devices across 60 countries worldwide, and presents clear performance information to their enterprise and service provider owners. As a network monitoring tool, it is important to NetEvidence that Highlight is available to its customers at the highest possible availability. They therefore required a secure and reliable hosting environment.
NetEvidence was also facing substantial difficulties in simulating Highlight in the testing environment. Andy Scutt, Operations Director at NetEvidence, explained: “As part of our sales process we need to be able to demonstrate Highlight to new business prospects; but historically, simulating it in the lab, and building and reinitialising parallel test servers proved to be a major effort, with a great deal of associated costs. We needed greater flexibility, so we started to look for a partner that could host the platform for us, remove the burden of managing our IT, and allow us to get on with running our business.”

The solution
After a thorough evaluation of the market, NetEvidence chose Claranet as its hosting provider. As part of the hosting solution, Claranet worked with NetEvidence to migrate the existing infrastructure to Claranet’s environment before testing and the go-live. To ensure resilience, Claranet also provided the hosting platform across two data centres to guarantee business continuity and availability of the service.

Following on from the successful application of the hosting platform, NetEvidence began implementation of Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC) offering. An integrated Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), VDC combines the provision of network and compute resources, and offers a new way of managing infrastructure.

Andy continued: “We migrated our line of business applications to the fully-virtualised VDC, with Claranet taking responsibility for monitoring and managing the performance of the applications themselves. What VDC provides us with is a resilience that allows Highlight to run independently, using Claranet’s technology to support its day-to-day business activity without having to invest in hosting technology itself. One of the key advantages is that it provides a ‘burst’ capacity of extra RAM for periods of high demand. With the previous set-up, we could only add extra capacity by purchasing and provisioning a new physical server in the co-location centre, which was a time-consuming and costly process.”

The decision to implement VDC was due to a need for flexible, scalable hardware and resiliency, as well as the support of a reliable infrastructure. NetEvidence needed to ensure that any change in infrastructure didn’t affect its customers during the testing process. Claranet’s VDC allows for live testing to take place without taking the system offline, meaning the system can be thoroughly tested before going live.

“Claranet’s VDC has given our business a new dimension of flexibility, both in our planning and our expenditure,” Andy continued. “We now only ever pay for the resources we need, so we don’t have to pay for servers that never get used. We also know that we have access to the best possible equipment in Claranet’s data centres, so we really are getting more for less,” Andy said.

The results
By outsourcing the service to Claranet, NetEvidence has seen significant cost-savings, of as much as 60 percent, as well as dramatic improvements to operational efficiency and simplified management processes. With the freedom to refocus their internal team on product and business development, the business has been able to grow by 50 percent over the past 12 months.

Andy explained: “Aside from the benefits of scalability and resilience, the real impact has been on our testing capabilities. Whereas it used to take weeks to spin up test servers, with VDC it takes six minutes to create and spin up an exact clone of a production system, with as much CPU and memory as we need. Resetting the test environment is just as quick. And we only pay for the time the test server is actually live, rather than having to maintain a permanent, high-spec server which is idle much of the time. The overall effect is to speed up and improve our Quality Assurance process, and the ability to push more features into the product.

“As Highlight is a network-monitoring tool, it’s vital that it is available 24/7, but the fact is that many of the providers that we’d spoken to simply weren’t up for the job at hand. Importantly, Claranet possesses the infrastructure, resources and know-how to host and look after the platform. We’re able to focus on our core activity of software development, safe in the knowledge that we are hosting in a stable and reliable environment.”
The relationship between NetEvidence and Claranet looks strong. Andy concluded: “The long relationship that we have had with Claranet owes much to their service. Whenever we’ve got a problem, or need to speak to someone, we are able to jump on the phone and speak to a solution expert who knows us, and knows what we are talking about immediately. As a result any issues are resolved much more quickly.”