Synextra

UK cloud provider Synextra recently took the market by storm—and doubled its monthly revenues—with Platform On Demand (POD), combining dedicated servers with a shared storage array to deliver true cloud benefits at an affordable cost. Underlying the POD offering are NetApp storage and data management, including ONTAP Select and StorageGRID.

“Our clients want optimum performance and instant control without the onerous upfront cost of buying their own infrastructure,” said Chris Piggott, co-founder and technical director of Synextra. “We identified a gap in the market and created POD, using NetApp technology, to provide private-cloud services for midsize and enterprise customers. POD is the best way we know to support their business growth.”

Synextra's primary storage is the NetApp AFF system. Its back-end storage platform is NetApp E-Series Hybrid Flash Storage. Recently, Synextra also deployed NetApp ONTAP Select and NetApp StorageGRID, at times surprising even NetApp with its use-case innovations.

To run its disaster recovery (DR) data center, Synextra chose ONTAP Select software-defined data storage. Part of the NetApp Data Fabric, ONTAP Select can quickly communicate with and transfer data among other storage endpoints across the fabric. As Synextra's secondary storage solution, ONTAP Select leverages the company's back-end E-Series platform. Synextra uses it in conjunction with NetApp SnapMirror, which provides unified replication for the Data Fabric and leverages ONTAP storage efficiencies by sending only changed blocks over the network.