The Challenge
The internet experts who founded Spanish cloud hosting company Gigas wanted to take away the pain of technology for their customers. “Our aim is to provide a cloud hosting service that’s easy for anyone to use, even if they have no technical knowledge,” explains Diego Cabezudo, CEO of Gigas. “We look after the technology, leaving our customers free to take care of their business.”
As the only company in Spain that specialises exclusively in cloud hosting, Gigas looks for the same focus in its strategic partners. Right from the start, it has colocated its cloud infrastructure at Interxion’s Madrid data centre campus.
“When it comes to data centres, no-one does it better than Interxion,” says Cabezudo. “Having looked at all the data centre providers in Spain, Interxion was our first choice for quality, reliability and scalability. They combine outstanding flexibility with meticulous processes and a reassuring attention to detail.”
Interxion was our first choice for quality, reliability and scalability. They combine outstanding flexibility with meticulous processes and a reassuring attention to detail.
Diego Cabezudo
CEO, Gigas
The Solution
An extremely rapid rate of growth for Gigas has put this partnership to the test – and it’s passed with flying colours. Having originally targeted small and medium-sized businesses such as web developers, digital agencies and e commerce operators, it wasn’t long before Gigas found that its services appeal equally to Spain’s larger enterprises, including banks, utilities and other companies listed on IBEX 35 (Spain’s stock market index). Even the largest companies are just as attracted as smaller companies to the simplicity of the Gigas web control panel for managing their virtual machines, vLANS and other cloud resources in real time, and to the customer support that solves around 85% of issues at the first point of contact.
Gigas was soon experiencing double-digit revenue growth and gaining around 100 new customers per month. With customer needs ranging from a single virtual machine to an entire cloud data centre, the pressure was on to respond unfailingly with flexible growth in capacity.
“As cloud hosting quickly becomes a critical element of many companies’ ICT strategies, especially to support fast growing levels of mobility, they’re relying on us to deliver,” says Cabezudo. “No matter how quickly we’ve needed to expand to respond to this demand, Interxion has been there with the scalability to meet our needs.”
The Interxion data centre enables rapid scalability through a modular design and a high-density architecture that supports very high levels of power and efficient cooling to each rack. This not only enables Gigas to meet growing customer demand by running more virtual servers per square metre, it reduces power consumption per server as density increases, contributing to energy efficiency. The data centre’s optimised power usage effectiveness (PUE), cold-aisle containment and other elements of design and operational efficiency all work together to ensure that scalability is always cost-effective.
“We’re able to pass our savings on energy costs to our customers, which makes a real difference given the high cost of power in Spain,” says Cabezudo. Another benefit is being able to contribute to the increasingly important green agenda through data centre operations designed to lower carbon emissions, including the sourcing of power from 100% renewable sources.
As well as having all the space and power it needs to meet growing customer demand, Gigas looks to Interxion to provide the always-on connectivity that is critical for cloud services.
“Because Interxion is carrier-neutral, any Tier 1 carrier we want to work with is already present in the data centre, and adding a new connection is always handled quickly and flawlessly,” says Cabezudo.
He continues: “Interxion is also cloud neutral, which means there’s no overlap between their customers and ours. This lack of competition has enabled us to develop a real partnership. We have complete trust in Interxion and we’re proud to advertise the fact that our infrastructure is colocated with them.”