Reducing data centre infrastructure expenses by 50%

SYSDBA is a South Africa-based managed service provider and reseller with customers around Africa and the United Kingdom. Largely coming from the financial services and healthcare sectors, the service provider’s customers have a variety of requirements: short term, transactional requests from customers who require flexibility for a wide range of application types, as well as larger strategic projects from customers who need data centre solutions aimed at serving digital transformation projects. 

SYSDBA had been using 3-tier architectures for years. However, when it came time for a refresh, the service provider sought out an innovative solution that would enable it to both consolidate racks of expensive storage and idle hosts, and also predictably and smoothly scale its internal and hosted customer environments.

SYSDBA chose the Nebulon smartCore solution to reduce infrastructure costs and bring cloud-simplicity to its on-premises infrastructure. To achieve this, the service provider deployed HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers with Nebulon smartInfrastructure to host its customer environments as well as internal operations. The solution is ideal as it has allowed SYSDBA to meet its immediate needs, and easily, quickly, and cost-efficiently scale the solution as customer demand increases. 

Nebulon smartInfrastructure was especially attractive to SYSDBA because it offered an opportunity to simplify and accelerate application deployment, control its environment from anywhere and reduce infrastructure maintenance efforts through behind-the-scenes software updates. These features are especially critical for certain customers in Africa who may lack skilled resources to manage large infrastructures as well as others located in areas with difficult or limited access. 

“Having to be onsite for a 4:00am firmware update isn’t safe or ideal in some customer settings, so the fact that Nebulon smartInfrastructure can be provisioned, managed and maintained from anywhere gives significant flexibility in terms of control,” said Marc Pratt, Strategic Alliances Manager at SYSDBA. “What made Nebulon even more attractive, however, was the fact that we cut our costs in half versus purchasing disaggregated storage and compute solutions. And because the solution doesn’t consume any server CPU, memory, or networking resources like hyperconverged infrastructure alternatives, we are able to use 100% of our server for the applications we run. Based on this alone, choosing Nebulon was a no-brainer.”

“Service providers like SYSDBA rely on solutions to help them address key time-to-value and management challenges they experience in their core and hosted data centres,” said Siamak Nazari, Nebulon CEO. “With Nebulon smartInfrastructure, not only can they address these challenges, but they can save infrastructure costs doing it.