The Challenge
”We’re seeing a trend towards IT as a Service,” says Florian Schicker, owner and Managing Director of Nessus. “Many of our customers have server rooms at their own sites, but want less and less to do with their hardware. Instead, they want to move their data and applications to a managed platform they can rely on.
With Nessus they can use highly available solutions on demand.” One such customer is the Red Cross in Vienna, whose public-safety answering point — which coordinate ambulances and other vital services — runs on Nessus infrastructure. Other customers who rely on Nessus for highly available hosted solutions include Zurich Insurance Group, ACP Holding and Austria’s chambers of commerce. Serving customers like these, Nessus knows it can’t take any chances where power, connectivity, security and scalability are concerned.
The data centre is designed and built in Vienna, has space for 5,000 servers, is protected by a biometric access system, features multi-fibre connectivity to Austria’s leading Internet exchange, and includes redundant UPS to assure availability. For enterprises in many sectors, particularly those like banking with stringent regulations, risk management is a key consideration. To comply with policies and regulatory requirements, customers are increasingly looking for data storage and backup solutions that go beyond what’s possible at a single data centre site. They require business continuity and disaster recovery solutions in which data is backed up to a second facility that is a defined minimum distance away. The objective is to minimise the likelihood of a natural or manmade event, such as a flood, an earthquake, or a nuclear or other threat taking out both sites, causing business processes to stop or data to be lost.
Customers get a classic dualsite solution with, for instance, Interxion housing their racks and Nessus providing backup services.
Florian Schicker
Owner and Managing Director, Nessus
The Solution
To meet these needs, Nessus chose Interxion Vienna as its data centre partner for dual-data centre solutions. Interxion’s facility matches the Nessus data centre in terms of quality, security and redundant power and cooling systems.
In addition, Interxion meets international standards for information security and business continuity management; ensures the technical teams responsible for monitoring are ITILv3 accredited; and has a widely recognised brand — all of which helps to reinforce trust among the Nessus customer base. “With Interxion’s data centre in the north of Vienna and ours in the south, customers get a classic dual-site solution, with, for instance, Interxion housing their racks and Nessus providing backup services,” confirms Schicker. For additional resilience, Nessus mirrors its data centre backups at Interxion. A partnership for future growth Nessus focuses its services towards medium-size enterprises. “We provide highly available solutions with cost-efficient usage models,” explains Schicker.
Nessus meters the services its customers use and scales infrastructure resources as needed. So for businesses that experience seasonal fluctuations in demand — such as mobile messaging specialist sms.at, and provider of experience packages Jollydays — it’s much easier to optimise costs. Because Interxion can address very large organisations with dedicated space and private rooms, the partnership between the two companies extends to sharing leads when either partner believes the other can best meet a customer’s requirements. As Schicker explains: “Interxion and Nessus have customers with very similar technical requirements, so it has become common practice for us to refer and share customers.” Based on the excellent working relationship already established between Nessus and Interxion, it’s a partnership that Schicker anticipates will continue to strengthen in the future.