Service-driven ICT solutions provider Network Platforms has recently developed a robust and scalable fibre infrastructure between Hetzner's Centurion data centre and Teraco Isando. The solution ensures Hetzner and Network Platforms can offer their clients an impressively rich array of services and connectivity alongside reliability, flexibility and cost-effective implementations.
"Hetzner is South Africa's largest specialist Web hosting provider," says Gavin Epstein, Sales Executive at Network Platforms. "We have now implemented fibre connectivity to their Centurion operations where they host a significant number of servers for their customers. We have essentially extended our data centre infrastructure into the Hetzner environment so as to offer services to Hetzner enterprise clients through a robust solution with impressive backup facilities."
The solution consists of an aggregation point of presence at the Hetzner Centurion data centre that includes a protected fibre ring that runs back to Teraco Isando. This ensures there are a number of redundancies built into the system so that customers always receive high levels of service. The high dependency of the applications on offer saw Network Platforms implement multiple fibre links to ensure there is fail-over and that downtime is minimal to non-existent.
"We included three independent fibre links back to our main data centre infrastructure so as to provide a reliable backup," says Epstein. "This ensures that we can deliver services to Hetzner customers while simultaneously offering them peace of mind and reliability."
A bevy of services
Through this implementation, Network Platforms can now provide tenants within the Hetzner data centre a variety of value-added services that range from remote NAP Africa ports to layer 2 access to infrastructure at Hetzner through fibre, microwave or a combination of connectivity options.
"Teraco is known as the biggest peering point in Africa, also known as NAP Africa," explains Epstein. "NAP Africa in the Teraco environment is a very strategic infrastructure for many organisations to connect to, and through our fibre links we can effectively deliver remote peering points to NAP Africa so other customers can potentially peer with NAP Africa Johannesburg and Cape Town."
Clients can now peer directly on NAP Africa, which has the benefits of speed, access and connectivity. Users gain faster access to all peers on the NAP Africa exchange as well as landing content from Akamai, Google and Microsoft. Another benefit is access to the Teraco data centre. The vendor-neutral environment provided by the latter assures the business that anything they build within it will be secure and have power.
"The objective of our solution is to bring in connectivity and to support Hetzner's growth as a vendor-neutral, multiple connectivity provider," says Epstein. "Hetzner is a cost-effective offering for users to gain access to a server infrastructure and for those who want to host their servers in a secure data centre as they shift their infrastructure to the cloud. As cloud gains momentum, this high level solution developed by Network Platforms, Teraco and Hetzner is delivering exactly what the modern enterprise needs."
In addition to these services, this installation provides the Hetzner customers with wireless functionality that was previously unavailable. Now, they can receive wireless connectivity from anywhere in the country through Teraco to Hetzner thanks to the network that Network Platforms has constructed.
"We also offer a live replication to our VMware environment for disaster recovery services, backup solutions and an Internet access model that is either usage-based or capacity-based," explains Epstein. "Clients that want dedicated capacity and an uncontended pipe regardless of size can take advantage of our capacity solution, while those who wish to access on a usage base can sign up for the usage-based solution. This ensures that our clients use the model that best suits their operational and financial requirements."
Connectivity, capability and confidence - Network Platforms has developed a solution that ticks all the business boxes and provides customers with an impressive array of services alongside much-needed reliability. Inventive and very much in tune with market trends, it's one to look out for...
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