“Other vendors we contacted were only interested in traditional CapEx billing and wanted to tie us to restrictive partnership agreements that had sales commitments.”
James Bishop, MD, Skye Cloud
Increased IAAS performance and reliability with Loadbalancer.org
Richard Ravenhill • Apr 20, 2023
We wanted to form a long-term relationship with a load balancing vendor to help deliver superior performance, reliability and failover across our infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform as well as within several global customer deployments. We needed a simple to deploy, easy to manage and stable solution that would provide our clients greater performance and peace of mind.
The Challenge
With a growing network of data centres, global deployments and an increasing number of clients with a geographically dispersed workforce, availability and accessibility of services, anywhere in the world is more crucial than ever before. With that in mind, we needed a load balancing partner with excellent credentials and a proven track record that could seamlessly plug into our existing infrastructure to further enhance performance, reach and redundancy. On top of this, we needed a partner who could extend the capabilities of our own in-house technical team to support the service promise we offer to our clients.
We also wanted to build on the commercial flexibility we provide for our clients. So, a partnership that could mirror our own monthly subscription model and not commit us to rigid pricing structures that would negatively impact our clients agility was also a requirement.
Approach
We utilise Loadbalancer.org virtual appliances: VA Max and VA 10G and these are delivered to us via a monthly subscription model.
Within the partnership we currently have more than nine pairs of virtual appliances installed across multiple data centre locations situated in the UK, Slovakia, Croatia, South Dakota and Canada. One pair of load balancers supports a multi-tenanted Exchange 2019 email system, hosting over 2,000 mailboxes for multiple clients.
Working with Loadbalancer.org we were able to put together an agreement that supported our ambition to enable our clients to pay for what they need, when they need and not be tied into long, controlling arrangements. Very simply, we pay a monthly fee based on the number of pairs of virtualised appliances deployed within our and customers’ production environments. This can be scaled up or down at any point giving us and our clients ultimate flexibility in this area.
Benefits
The partnership helps us deliver highly resilient and high-performing IT solutions for our clients, ultimately giving them more peace of mind. One of our clients is a technology company that provides an IT platform for online betting websites. The use of Loadbalancer.org’s appliances helps them ensure the constant availability and optimal performance of its betting platform, even during major sporting events when traffic can peak dramatically.
The commercial structure of the partnership gives us the ability to enable our clients to scale up and down in real time, and to only pay for what they need.
Once Loadbalancer.org appliances are set up (which is a very easy process) and are up and running, you really don’t need to think about them.
“Loadbalancer.org provides a simple to deploy, easy to manage and stable solution that provides our clients and us with greater peace of mind.”
Richard Ravenhill, Technical Director, Skye Cloud
New Title
Read Skye Cloud's James Bishop's article in Your Business Spring 2024
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