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Investing in the cloud-ready, next generation data centre

The Consultel brand has been around for 35 years and is a leading IT consultancy that delivers expertise in hybrid cloud solutions for all businesses. Established in 1999 and headquartered in Australia, Consultel Cloud’s experience is diverse and covers an array of next generation technologies and services.

“There’s quite a few different cloud providers out there, like AWS, Microsoft, and Google. What we have here at Consultel Cloud, is a hybrid cloud solution for various industries,” said Benjamin Molloy, who heads Consultel Cloud.

“Many companies think that it is enough for one cloud provider to put everything into a single solution. I think that it is very hard with the public cloud to have calculated costs that are fairly accurate because there are many factors to consider. Some of these include time of usage, performance, the amount of network and so on.”

Consultel Cloud says that what it does makes it unique by providing choice and flexibility to their customers in how they architect their hybrid cloud strategy. “We partner with major technology vendors such as NetApp who lead in solid-state storage technology, as well as Equinix, the largest interconnected data centre globally, to offer choice and reliable cloud services to our customers. What Equinix has that is compelling is their Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) product. This is basically a gateway to multiple cloud service providers including SAP, Microsoft Azure and AWS across over 180+ data centres around the world,” said Molloy.

Molloy said the company is very open and precise in its offerings and its performance is assured. “We provide guaranteed performance at an exact costing. In comparison to other providers where there is shared infrastructure, it may be cheaper, but the reliability and performance that customers depend on may not be there,” he said.

Molloy cited the company’s partnership with the US-headquartered multinational storage and cloud data services provider, NetApp, as one of the keys to its success.

“Consultel Cloud’s cloud platform is built on NetApp’s hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) technology. HCI simplifies IT infrastructure immensely by bringing together separate storage, separate switches and separate compute all into the one system with network connectivity and is cloud-ready in the one ‘building block’. With the first generation of HCI technology, if you needed to increase your compute performance or storage capacity, it meant that you needed to buy more of the one ‘building block’, irrespective of whether you needed more of just the compute or storage component.”

“With NetApp HCI, what makes it truly next generation in its kind for hyper converged infrastructure is that the storage and compute can scale independently of one another whilst maintaining guaranteed performance, otherwise known as Quality of Service. Licensing costs are reduced and you don’t pay for what you don’t need – so when we build our cloud services on innovative data management technology like this, it means we get to pass on those efficiencies and savings to our customers too,” said Molloy.

Molloy explained that customers can enjoy all the benefits of NetApp technology and consume it as a service, so users can turn it on and off as they please. They can only pay for as much as they need and for the time that they need it.

Consultel Cloud’s services extends across all industries of all sizes, including food and beverage, medical and even the debt collection databases for two of the big four banks.

“Our customer base is made up of all different sized companies who have different IT requirements. There is no perfect sized company and that’s why we provide tailored solutions that will help our customers find the right kind of hybrid cloud solution for their needs.”

“Whether it’s a large retail operation or a national food distributor, staff will need access to applications and data to do their job,” said Molloy. “The last thing they will want to spend time worrying about is their IT infrastructure – they just want it to be available and to work.”

When it comes to cloud-based services for food and beverage, large amounts of data need to be stored and secured. This can be with regards to the cool storage, temperature management that needs to be monitored constantly. In this case, Consultel Cloud can help since they also do telecommunications.

“We have been across many different types of manufacturing industries. We can run dark fibre and provide very cost-effective fibre products. At this point, the company is working with a renowned food manufacturer and we’ve got a lot experience with those type of industries. At the same time, for these industries, we provide not just a cloud product but a complete solution where we can actually install the high-performance fibre for type of industries that run 24 hours. And should they need to relocate, that’s where cloud comes in and can really provide support on ensuring their operations are not disrupted,” said Molloy.

Consultel Cloud also provides the manufacturing sector, in particular, with solid-state, on-premises replication. “We provide solid-state storage units on-premises because with those type of manufacturers, fibre does get cut sometimes and things do go down. And we provide the infrastructure for these situations to ensure businesses have redundancy in the event of a disaster,” said Molloy.

Should customers see the need to upscale their existing network infrastructure, Consultel Cloud also does system integration, between companies. Molloy explained that they have worked with many companies that have gone through mergers or separations; in this sense, they possess a lot of experience and they have good knowledge on how to rapidly scale their platform horizontally if required. “This is because we architect our NetApp based cloud offering to be truly next generation”. So, if have a need for a large amount of storage quickly for a customer, we can provision that in a very short period of time,” said Molloy.

A potential issue that manufacturers face today is data protection and recovery in the event of an emergency. To counter this, data that is stored and managed on Consultel Cloud’s platform is encrypted at the storage level so each customer’s data is securely segregated. In other words, space is not shared and one component of the environment for one client is never ever combined within another client’s environment.

When it comes to having any manufacturing, organisation having the right hybrid cloud strategy, it is important for it to be focused on the business they are providing for their market and worry less about things like managing IT infrastructure. Molloy said that customers of Consultel Cloud are provided with data centre technology and cloud services for the next generation, and helps to take the complexity out of the operational aspect of IT.

“We believe in investing in robust technology for our cloud platform that customers depend on. Additionally, while customers only pay for what they need, they know they will have a high-quality cloud service that provides them with the availability and flexibility that their business demands.

“Therefore, it is certainly important to have a tailored cloud solution that’s going to be reliable, cost-effective, and architected with technology that provides the best performance – that’s what we can offer them,” said Molloy.

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