Craig Murphy (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
Network automation vendor Devoli has bucked the trend of cloud migrations, instead opting for a move to a hybrid on-prem solution powered by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).
Three years ago, Devoli had three core platforms that supported all voice applications and network management systems. With Dell servers and many of its monitoring and backend systems sitting with AWS, the systems and equipment were nearing end of life.
“We run telco applications that require very high bandwidth and found that AWS couldn’t keep up with the necessary processing power,” said Ken Nicod, networking director at Devoli.
Also of concern was the increasing costs involved with a voice network that makes lots of small processing transactions. With public cloud no longer a long-term viable option, Devoli looked to create its own.
Searching for a solution that would allow Devoli to continue to support its customers seamlessly, Nicod was in the market for a full five-year engagement and a partnership with end-to-end service.
Devoli had an existing relationship with Ingram Micro, who put forward HPE’s Alletra dHCL product, which includes HPE Storage and HPE ProLiant Servers, that could provide streamlined infrastructure and optimised performance.
For Craig Murphy, general manager of channels at HPE, moving to on-prem solution was an interesting scenario given the current wider trends of migrating to the cloud.
“With everyone saying that mass migration to the cloud is the solution to everything, we are saying, ‘No, not quite – what’s fit for purpose? Where does the data need to reside to get the best outcome?’” he said. “We have come to the realisation that mass migration to the cloud is not the answer – hybrid models is the way to go.
“We’re in a hybrid world and HPE has positioned itself to be the perfect partner for that. It doesn’t matter what cloud you’re in – we can interact with it and we can also have an on-prem or co-load solution at the same time. That’s the way of the future for us."
With a partnership set in motion, this would be the first time such a solution had been employed in the Asia Pacific region.
“There’s a lot of drive to go to someone else’s cloud but not as much to create your own,” Nicod said.
“Because of that, this engagement was exciting and different from most projects. We gained direct access to the HPE team, including their engineers.”
The delivery of the project occurred in the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, presenting the additional challenges of masking and keeping engineers in bubbles. Following an eight-week deployment process, 68 out of 74 applications were migrated to the private cloud in one day.
“It was really tough times – we were in the thick of COVID, we had our deployment guys in full PPE with lots of strong protocols around them and they had to be in discrete bubbles. Managing that, as well as trying to get the supply chain to function, was a challenge,” Murphy said.
“Ingram Micro facilitated a lot of that side of things for us, so it was a great success from a partnership perspective with the three of us involved – it all converged for us.”
Devoli’s network infrastructure and security team now runs entirely on the private cloud, with the exception of a few monitoring and alert systems in case the platform fails.
The software side of the business still operates through AWS due to flexibility for the development team, Nicod said, but over the next three to six months intends to migrate as many applications as possible to the private cloud.
While the number of platforms has reduced from three to one to serve both Australia and New Zealand, Nicod says reliability has been improved and costs have been reduced by 50 per cent in migrating to the private cloud.
Other notable outcomes include a 50 to 75 per cent improvement in the time to deploy support applications, provision new workloads and deploy new compute and storage resources. Devoli has also seen a 25 per cent improvement in lifecycle management tasks, less time troubleshooting issues and automated capacity planning that makes the team’s routines significantly faster.
“Devoli’s differentiator is our ability to deliver any broadband voice service within a few hours – not weeks or months,” Nicod said.
“We have some large customers who consume a lot of voice traffic. Now we have the enhanced reliability to move faster, which has garnered us even more business.”
