Excited for the Future: Cypriot ICT Service Provider Teams Up with Huawei to Scale Its Business

Cloudlayer8 (CL8) is the first independent, carrier-neutral Uptime Institute Tier III-rated data center — for both Design and Facility — in Cyprus, offering cutting-edge data center and cloud services to local and international markets. With over 10 years of experience, advanced facilities, tailored-made solutions, and round-the-clock support, CL8 enables customers to set up and optimize their Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and operations based on individual business needs. As such, it serves customers working in the ecommerce, financial, education, trade, and public sectors, enjoying a solid customer base and increasing international growth.

Recognizing the Need to Boost Storage Performance

The company's priority is to help its customers focus on their core business, with CL8 taking on the complexity of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on their behalf, including cloud and data center solutions, Disaster Recovery (DR), and digital transformation. With this goal in mind, CL8 creates custom solutions fine-tuned for end-users' precise needs, combining physical and virtual device capabilities from multiple vendors in a single package.

However, suffering from over-complexity, the company's own storage performance was beginning to face challenges as it continued to offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), shared storage, data center, and cloud industry services to more and more customers. To evolve and become a more proactive service provider, CL8 knew it needed to optimize its infrastructure, with clear storage performance goals to meet, including guaranteed reliability and availability.

The CL8 team needed any prospective solution provider to offer excellent support, so that it could continue to prioritize customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and swiftly respond to any urgent issues that might arise. This would, of course, only increase its market appeal, at the same time improving internal efficiency.

High Performance, High Availability, and High Levels of Support

After considering a range of several possible partners to help it scale up, CL8 finally chose Huawei. "Huawei was able to adapt to our precise needs, right from the start," noted Theodosis Theodosiou, Business Development Manager at CL8. "We required a competitive solution that would also lower power consumption," he added.

Huawei examined CL8's infrastructure and provided an OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage solution, a new generation of mid-range all-flash systems. Designed to meet high availability, utilization, and usability concerns, OceanStor Dorado offers huge storage capacity alongside rapid data access. "Major decision criteria for such a mission-critical storage system, which hosts our multi-tenant IaaS offerings and other customer workloads, were enterprise support and vendor credibility," Theodosiou pointed out. "The design phase was based on best practices: proactively anticipating future changes and needs is crucial to any business. Our experienced engineer worked with Huawei's support team to validate the architecture design to ensure optimum deployment and configuration."

A System Built to Last: Foundations for Future Growth

CL8 has seen nothing but positive results after implementing its new solution. With OceanStor Dorado in place, it enjoys millisecond-level latency and extremely high reliability. The company enjoys much better performance — 2.5 times higher than before — with triple the capacity. In addition to outstanding performance, OceanStor Dorado also saves power, consuming up to 35% less than the legacy solution.

"Offering money-back guarantee SLAs for a data center is not easy. Enterprise-grade reliable storage from a trusted vendor is therefore essential for our own peace of mind," Theodosiou said. "We deployed OceanStor Dorado and our experience with it has been very positive. The solution is stable, easy to use, and robust, and the performance is excellent. Huawei's support, credibility, and outstanding performance ratio is a unique competitive advantage."

CL8's new storage system also gives it the flexibility to quickly address and grasp new opportunities as they arise. Indeed, OceanStor Dorado excels in database, virtualization, and big data analytics applications, so CL8 can now offer a broader portfolio of customizable solutions to serve a wider range of business needs, responding faster to the market as customer expectations evolve.