A Storage Solution Bringing Telecommunications Upgrades All over Austria

A premium network and Internet Service Provider (ISP), Citycom may be physically located in Graz, the second largest city in Austria, but it operates on a truly global scale. From individual entrepreneurs to organizations much larger in scope, Citycom's self-owned and hosted fiber network offers high-quality internet, television, and phone services to customers of all shapes and sizes. It also provides highly available data center solutions, including storage and servers, along with MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) resources for national and international networks, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, and more.

Digital Transformation Drives Infrastructure Renewal

With digitalization the driving force of business transformation, almost all enterprises are now looking toward overhauling Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Lacking dedicated in-house IT teams, however, most turn to outsource: that's where Citycom steps in. And with demand for greater stability only growing from customers, including state-of-the-art synchronous mirrored storage solutions and more sophisticated Quality-of-Service (QoS) assurances, Citycom itself began looking for an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) provider capable of renewing and upgrading its own infrastructure. Here, on top of the wish list sat better performing, easier-to-use storage, which would allow the company to grow its business, bringing more customers onto its platform.

Standing Out from the Crowd: OceanStor Dorado 5000

Citycom sent out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to eight different vendors, in turn receiving offers from five. A multi-level tendering process asked vendors to provide highly detailed descriptions, following strict technical criteria, as well as to outline certifications and give a quotation in full. Explicitly, Citycom required synchronous replication and improved QoS management, along with a guaranteed level of data reduction, in order to boost efficiency without expanding capacity.

During the process of evaluating the different offers received, Citycom was invited by Huawei to visit its Munich OpenLab. Boasting an impressive performance ratio and notable ease of implementation, Huawei's OceanStor Dorado 5000 with integrated HyperMetro, Huawei's active-active storage solution, was finally selected as the preferred solution of choice.

A Brighter Future in Store

Rewind to 2020 and Citycom actually guided one of its own customers to select OceanStor Dorado 3000, a storage solution well-suited to that customer's particular needs. Sometime later, the same customer then chose two OceanStor 2600 v5 products for backup.

From this work together, Citycom knew that Huawei solutions offer the stability of performance it was looking for in its infrastructure upgrade. And after implementation, the company can better cope with its internet plans, including fiber optic and DSL connections, with speeds ranging from 16 Mbps to 1 Gbps. The high reliability supports television packages with a variety of channels, including international options, as well as phone services with unlimited calling within Austria and to select international destinations. Besides residential customers, Huawei's Smart QoS features helped Citycom easily define three levels of service, with the aim of attracting more business customers, providing higher quality services, and making more efficient and effective use of resources.

In addition, as many global enterprises have discovered, all-flash technology from Huawei helps to reduce power consumption: for Citycom, energy requirements have fallen by more than 70% compared to the legacy solution, making the company's data center greener and more cost-efficient, almost overnight. Plus, simplified deployment accelerates the process of getting new services online, causing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to fall by some 20%.

At the end of the day, it's a simple equation. A new Huawei solution has put Citycom in a great place as it gears up to be a reliable partner for its global customers, big and small.