Beelastic, Switzerland’s 100GbE native Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and bare-metal service provider, will soon be enabling customers to provision their own services. It aims to do this with the minimum complexity and the guaranteed performance they expect.
The company already has approximately 500 bare-metal servers from diverse manufacturers and a 1,300 kilometres optical dark fibre network connecting Switzerland’s economic centres from Frankfurt to Lugano at a speed of 96 x 100G – making it the only provider to guarantee latency at high availability.
“The real-time society needs an infrastructure that guarantees the lowest latency and response times with high-cost efficiency,” explains Hanspeter Tinner, chief service officer and co-founder of Beelastic, regarding the extreme demands of Switzerland’s renowned financial services. “This is only possible if the latest technologies are used throughout.”
The company relies on best-of-breed equipment, including Nvidia’s GPUs for its installed hardware and Nvidia’s networking business unit’s Mellanox switches and Cumulus OS for the operating system. Fortigate has been installed for security.
On principle, they avoided lock-in by insisting on a highly efficient open-standards and fully transparent solution. The services they offer range from bare-metal servers, GPU-accelerated virtual desktops, and Veeam Cloud backups to S3 storage – all with appropriate ISO certifications and fully data-agnostic.
Beelastic planned its entire infrastructure from a near-greenfield starting point. “With an eye to the future, we have freed ourselves from history and decided not to update the legacy systems with a lot of effort and costs. In retrospect, this proved to be the right way forward,” explains Tinner. The company also understood the prominent role of network management in the flexible and cost-efficient provision of transmission and computing services.
They chose Apstra for their end-to-end solution to automate, simplify, and continuously validate the network’s design, installation, and operation. This enabled Beelastic to mitigate the technology risk associated with data centres by removing the complexity while dramatically increasing reliability and operational agility through intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and continuous validation. Apstra’s Operating System (AOS) supports unified intent and policy across heterogeneous infrastructures eliminating complexity, scale constraints, & vendor lock-in. Beelastic is now empowered to make changes to their networks quickly and reliably in the future.
Tinner sums up, “After we had decided to go for a completely open system, Apstra AOS was the logical option. The implementation went smoothly and the operation is extremely simple”. The entire process took just four weeks, and a single employee can now operate and control the whole network operation.
Mansour Karam, founder and president at Apstra comments, “The power of AOS is a consistent and streamlined operational model across the infrastructure, regardless of switching platform! And because of our unique architecture, Beelastic no longer has to decide between doing something right or doing it fast. Apstra’s solution will enable Beelastic to do more with less, eliminating staffing and budget constraints. Our solution was built by architects and operators for architects and operators.”
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