Ikoula's Cloud Hosting Services

Background

Founded in 1998, Ikoula, the French cloud hosting expert and winner of the EuroCloud award for “Best Cloud Infrastructure Service,” runs services in fields such as domain names, Virtual Private Servers (VPSs), and dedicated servers. Ikoula started its business with equipment room and rack leasing, then later engaged in dedicated server hosting and cloud services, enriching its services and transforming into a cloud service provider. Traditional data centers, however, could not meet its service development requirements so the company needed to evolve into cloud data centers.

Challenges

Ikoula has six points of presence located on three continents. Based in France, the company launched cloud services in the United States, Germany, and Singapore, and opened its first subsidiary in the Netherlands in the spring of 2016. With 65 employees, Ikoula hosts more than 37,000 websites and maintains more than 8,000 virtual servers, serving more than 25,000 customers. Ikoula is working to substantially expand services and finds that legacy network issues become barriers to fulfill their vision of providing managed services with up to a 99.999% Service Level Agreement (SLA) to customers as a cloud service provider. To meet cloud service requirements and achieve objectives of high performance, high reliability, elastic scaling, along with simpler Operations and Maintenance (O&M), Ikoula wanted to construct data center networks that:

Break through limitations of the original Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) network, make full use of network resources, and elastically scale out over rapid customer and service growth

Resolve the network congestion issue due to the small cache of the original network, maintain compatibility with subsequent evolution, and can support 40 GE, 100 GE, or a higher bandwidth

Feature simple O&M without requiring additional network maintenance employees

Solution

Huawei Data Center Network Solution reduces service deployment complexity, improves system reliability, and provides the functions of monitoring and managing resources, meeting Ikoula’s quick service development requirements.

Scalable network architecture:

NE routers and CloudEngine data center switches were used to build a data center network that can support 100 GE interconnection, 10 GE access, and End-to-End or E2E large cache. Using an architecture that supports 10 GE, 25 GE, 40 GE, and 100 GE physical servers, the network can be elastically scaled out, relieving Ikoula from worries about bandwidth and network speed for quick cloud service development.

Simple and convenient network O&M:

Huawei Data Center Network Solution uses virtualization technologies to establish loop-free high-reliability networks, simplifying O&M management for network devices and improving O&M efficiency.

Evolution into an SDN ready network:

All devices support Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN), and the data center network can smoothly evolve towards a Software-Defined Networking or SDN, meeting both present and future service requirements. Huawei Data Center SDN Solution can be subsequently deployed without reconstructing the network, facilitating network automation reducing CAPEX and OPEX.

Benefits

Ikoula used Huawei Data Center Network Solution to reconstruct the data center network and resolve the issues of low bandwidth and complex O&M faced by Ikoula. After reconstruction, Ikoula enables public cloud customers to deploy VMs within 30 seconds in one-click mode. The significant growth in access performance enhances user experience and loyalty and will yield more benefits for Ikoula.