Partner Article

Abiquo selected by CARI.net to enable cloud offering

CARI.net is a semi-managed service provider with over ten years’ experience in delivering a variety of cloud and dedicated server products to small and medium sized businesses globally. Focusing on providing Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to its clients, CARI.net offers an affordable, secure and superior service via multiple state-of-the-art data centres, each with an infrastructure that ensures continuous uptime. Its cost-effective, hosted services aim to form the backbone of its customers’ businesses, so they can remain focused on day-to-day operations and staying competitive.

Building confidence in the cloud

In order to give SMBs confidence in using IaaS for their IT provision and ensure they can reap the benefits, CARI.net needed to provide an easy to use and reliable platform for its customers, many of which may not have used hosted or cloud-based infrastructure services before, as Head of Technology at CARI.net, AJ Wasem, explains:

“To help our customers take advantage of IaaS, we required a cloud platform that would allow our customers to quickly and easily provision virtual machines, support network virtualisation and separation, and have the ability to save or upload custom images to a library for deployment on a per customer basis. We had spent ten years building automation into our hosted environments, however we needed a self-service portal for provisioning servers, networks or external storage.”

Finding the right solution

When considering a solution, CARI.net evaluated six cloud platform providers each offering different parts of the solution but not the whole package. Hybrid cloud management provider Abiquo was the only solution that ticked all of the boxes and provided CARI.net with an easy to use software platform that would allow its customers to easily manage their cloud environments and provide flexibility to meet their needs, now and in the future.

“What made Abiquo stand out was the fact it is one of the only truly agnostic offerings on the market, giving complete plug and play capability to end users. Abiquo gave us a real opportunity to provide solutions that meet the needs of our customers, and one that dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of entry to the cloud. The team also shares our belief that technology should not be a barrier to entry or that vendor lock-ins should restrict business potential,” adds AJ Wasem.

CARI.net first deployed Abiquo 1.8 in 2011, an Enterprise Cloud Management platform that provided the ability to define an unlimited number of individual user roles, and to assign any combination of privileges, selected from a comprehensive range, to each. This gave customers the ability to significantly decrease the cost and complexity of managing their virtual IT environments while maintaining control of the physical infrastructure and increasing agility to change hypervisors as needed.

Shortly after the first major upgrade to Abiquo, CARI.net enhanced provision by migrating to the then new Abiquo 2.0, which provided the ability for managed service providers (MSPs), such as CARI.net, to offer users simplified deployment portals, virtual enterprises, and virtual appliances. This is exactly what their customers needed in order to help solve the barriers faced and eliminate many of the old challenges of IT, especially around capacity planning. “With Abiquo 2.0, customers are able to use what they need and as soon as a project is complete they are able to scale down, put the project on hold for later use or wrap it up and they’re done. There is no cost outlay for a capital expense on hardware or long-term contracts. All the elements that made IT tough for the past thirty years are gone.”

Results

Since implementing Abiquo’s Cloud Management solution, CARI.net has realised numerous benefits. Customers have been able to create and configure their own infrastructure to suit their specific business requirements, including designing their own network and upload, saving their own virtual machine templates and delivering their virtual data centre and public cloud. All integrated seamlessly with existing technologies whilst being simple and quick to monetise.

“After deploying Abiquo’s cloud management platform, the environment has run smoothly and has worked as well as expected. Abiquo has been extremely responsive and supportive with any issues or questions we have had along the way and have provided us with great support. The Abiquo team has offered us re-assurance, and we have complete confidence in the solution and expertise they offer.”

Moving forward, CARI.net see the Abiquo solution as a key part of its growth strategy and a front runner for its future Linux virtual machine hosting platforms which it will make available to customers. CARI.net is also looking to upgrade to the latest Abiquo platform in the near future to ensure it can provide the most up-to-date and feature-rich management platform for its customers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Finlay .