Less than one-year-old French MSP got its start based on IBM hardware and software. Now Zetark is ready to launch its new set of cloud storage services using the same Armonk gear.
At the tail end of last year, Zetark launched to go after the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and cloud storage markets. But it needed a technology underpinning it could rely on to support an IT infrastructure that could scale with customer needs.
And Zetark had to move fast, as general manager Maxime Aernout argued at the time. “We had set ourselves an ambitious deadline for launching our innovative cloud storage service. It was vital to select a highly integrated solution so that we could hit the ground running, and we wanted to achieve the lowest possible energy cost per petabyte of storage.”
The answer was Big Blue’s PureFlex System Express running IBM SmartCloud mated with FileTek StorHouse. This all came as a turnkey system, already integrated and set up, and featuring networking, storage, systems management and computing.
The idea behind Zetark was to have close relationships with customers. “Our customers want the confidence that comes from dealing with real people rather than a faceless Internet service,” said Aernout. “This human dimension goes hand-in-hand with robust service levels and enterprise-class infrastructure from IBM. An important factor in our choice of PureFlex is its long-term roadmap and the vision from IBM of how the platform will develop over the coming years. We know that the continued integration of hardware and software into a single, flexible platform is something that will give our customers ongoing confidence in our services.”
Now Zetark is ready to roll out its cloud storage. It claims the all-in-one nature of IBM PureFlex is already paying dividends, shrinking client deployments from two months to a couple of weeks.
“SmartCloud Entry enables us to respond to customer needs, and gives us the ability to do granular billing based on their precise usage of memory, disk and processing resources. Our primary offering is centered on storage, but we also have the flexibility to offer a broader set of IaaS solutions," said Aernout. “The combination of the Linux KVM hypervisor with IBM SmartCloud Entry and PureFlex enables us to run a highly flexible yet low-cost infrastructure.”
IBM’s Own MSP Play
IBM itself plays in the MSP space with SmartCloud Enterprise+. This IaaS tool is completely managed and particularly useful for critical enterprise workloads such as Oracle or SAP.
Big Blue offers big SLAs, guaranteeing as much as 99.9 percent uptime.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
