• Price intelligence firm is among first customers for Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre service

Market intelligence firm Cogenta has migrated key elements of its IT infrastructure into a virtual data centre that it provisioned itself – with only a few clicks of a mouse.

Cogenta is among the first customers for Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC) service, which launched last month. The new service has enabled Cogenta to build its own virtual data centre through a self-service portal where it can add compute, storage and networking resources within seconds via a simple drag-and-drop.

The 24 month contract with Claranet is billed on a monthly basis, but provides a “burst” option for periods of high demand, ensuring that Cogenta only pays for the resources that it is currently using. Claranet fully manages the delivery and availability of all resources on the platform, including integration with their own MPLS network.

Cogenta’s Chief Technical Officer, Yann Cluchey, said:

We supply real-time pricing data to the UKs biggest retail brands and our reputation depends entirely on our ability to provide the most up-to-date information to our customers. Reliability and uptime is therefore absolutely critical, and any downtime could be disastrous. But while our previous hosting service was robust, it was time-consuming and expensive to add new resources; we also spent considerable time and resources on managing the servers.

With Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre, we can provision new resources quickly on an as-needed basis, with a couple of clicks of a mouse.

This enables us to expand our server infrastructure without capital expenditure, ensuring that we have optimum availability for the services on which our customers rely. What’s more, because Claranet fully manages our resources and hardware, we don’t lose time and productivity from having to diagnose and fix any problems that may occur.

Claranet launched its VDC service in December 2011 after exhaustive market research into users’ concerns surrounding Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings, as the company’s UK managing director, Michel Robert, explains. “Our research found that customers were most concerned about data security, and in particular where data resides; ease of migration; and reliability. These findings greatly influenced the design of the service: to ensure reliability, VDC is based on best-of-breed technologies and integrated with Claranet’s own network; all data is held in local data centres; and the platform is hypervisor-agnostic to facilitate migration.

“Because the Virtual Data Centre brings together computing and network provisioning, customers like Cogenta benefit from a single-point-of-contact for all enquiries; a single provider with responsibility for the end-to-end service; and service level agreements (SLAs) based on overall availability,” concluded Robert.