We are building a Tier 3 data center using Cisco technologies

In order to get the maximum benefit from the investment, we decided to place our data centers in two highly secure colocation centers in Prague instead of building our own premises. It is a Tier 3 device with 99.982% uptime, which represents an interruption of 1.6 hours per year, and with N + 1 redundancy providing protection against power failure for 72 hours. 

Tier 3 is the highest level of infrastructure available in the Czech Republic. Customers can choose whether they want to use one or both of our data centers. For example, they can place a production environment in one and a disaster recovery backup in the other, or simply place everything in one location. In any case, they will receive highly available IaaS fully managed by Cloud4com with lightning-fast disaster recovery. 

From the very beginning, we have built our data center infrastructure on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server technology, which is based on the standard Intel x86 architecture and supports both virtual and physical machines. Most importantly, the UCS system has allowed us to use blade servers that we can connect, disconnect and replace during full operation without downtime. 

Launched in 2009 when we launched Cloud4com, the Cisco UCS technology was only two years old, so it was still hot news. Many of our customers demanded its benefits, but without the cost of ownership. But we did not use the price as a differentiator. While renting UCS as part of the IaaS cloud services package cost less, the real advantage of our product was the features of the infrastructure itself, which offered both high availability and a higher level of security ccie data center salary. 

We work with Cisco to build trust

To reassure potential customers, we have emphasized the fact that we own the physical infrastructure and thus guarantee security ourselves. No one outside Cloud4com has access to our customers' cloud applications and data. This reassured especially IT managers who were still afraid of spying from times past. 

However, our partnership with Cisco is not limited to UCS. We recently upgraded the switches by moving from the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series to the 9000 Series, increasing throughput to 400 Gbps tenfold. We also use Cisco ASR 1000 aggregation routers to aggregate and encrypt network traffic, CSR 1000V cloud service routers to connect customers to our cloud, and Cisco ASA adaptive security devices for firewalls and network security applications. 

We operate almost exclusively on Cisco technologies and are one of its largest customers in the country. We used its technology to educate the Czech IT community and taught it to perceive and appreciate the benefits of cloud technologies and IaaS. To build a successful and scalable cloud IaaS solution, for us it meant to automate every process that is possible and to actively monitor the occurrence of events in the system and its use in real time. In this regard, Cisco's strategy has been a key factor in our success. Its approach is to ensure the availability and control of technologies in a software way, through well-defined APIs. This ensures consistency and speed of service delivery and high availability. It also allows us to provide customers with contractual guarantees of parameters while maintaining the economy of operation. 

In the last five years, we can observe an increase in demand for cloud technologies and IaaS among medium-sized companies. IT and CFOs come to taste the idea of ​​infrastructure as a regular monthly expense, similar to electricity or software licenses. 

Although this shift in attitudes partially stimulated the arrival of cloud services by Amazon and Microsoft, we are still considered a leader and pioneer in the field of IaaS in the Czech Republic.