Creating an End-to-End Cloud Infrastructure with Utmost Reliability

As the founder and ultimate decision-maker for my company, I am always on the lookout for new and leading technology that can create tremendous value for my business and customers. I will not hesitate to invest and adopt a new solution if it fulfills my requirements.

My company, Wiz Technologies (WIZTECH), is a privately managed cloud service provider in Singapore providing a one-stop service to businesses for IT infrastructure solutions, business digitalization, private and public cloud adoptions, web hosting, application development, and many more. We work closely with leading-edge manufacturers and product vendors to deliver professional end-to-end support to our customers as a single point of contact and simplify IT management. I founded WIZTECH in 2007 in Singapore with a regional presence in countries such as Vietnam, Japan, Australia, and China. 

The landscape of our industry has shifted over the years. For instance, it wasn’t long ago when businesses hosted 90% of their workloads on-premises. Nowadays, it is common to adopt hybrid hosting solutions such as 50% of the workload hosted on-premises and 50% on the cloud. Particularly during the pandemic, we’ve witnessed the spike in cloud adoptions due to a growing number of businesses switching to remote work and retailers shifting to e-commerce. Regardless of which industry they are from, this uncertain environment meant our customers needed stable cloud solutions with high availability to ensure optimal operation and business continuity.

A Gap in the Market Led to Our Unique Cloud Offering

WIZTECH is an SAP Silver Partner and we offer Cloud Services for SAP Business One to support mission-critical workloads. The unique cloud offering grew out of a gap I noticed in the market when several businesses faced challenges with the major cloud platform providers. The volatile monthly bills associated with unpredictable and high monthly cloud operating costs can be detrimental to these businesses and indirectly affect their profitability.

I put myself in my customers’ shoes: if I were to subscribe to a service, I would want visibility and predictability into my monthly expenditures. I wouldn’t want to experience unexpected costs if I exceeded my intended usage. As there was no alternative available, this led me to provide private cloud solutions with a monthly flat fee for compute and storage resources without metering usage.

Beyond a typical IT provider selling and implementing ERP solutions for SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics, our in-house developers also create customized ERP solutions. Thus, we could offer flexible cloud solutions to any existing ERP solutions that our customer uses, saving them the hassle of managing multiple vendors throughout the process.

The Importance of Uptime

Our unique Cloud Services for SAP Business One complements our existing general-purpose cloud that runs on HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. The key factors for choosing HPE Nimble Storage dHCI for our general-purpose cloud were its high stability uptime with robust performance, cost-effectiveness, and, most importantly, HPE’s six nines guarantee. At 99.9999% uptime, an average customer would experience about 2.6 seconds of downtime monthly, or less than 32 seconds per year.

Providing a high uptime is our vital benchmark as a cloud solution provider. Any downtime is detrimental to WIZTECH and our customers as it can cost them billions of dollars. It is our responsibility to ensure and provide the highest uptime possible to our customers. Almost after a year of using HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, I was convinced that it could guarantee 100% uptime.

Before adopting HPE solutions, we experienced downtime due to hardware issues and we had inadequate support. Our engineers needed to drop by our data center once every few months to resolve issues and perform routine maintenance, which led to downtime and inconveniences for our customers. It increased our help desk team's workload as they experienced a surge in customer support requests. We spent a large number of resources to rectify such situations to minimize disruptions for our clients as quickly as possible. Typically, if a customer experienced three or four down periods a year, they are more likely to change vendors. Hence, I knew we had to look for alternatives and invest in new equipment to resolve these issues and improve the quality of our solutions to our customers.

Before buying HPE hardware, I was impressed with HPE's pre-sales team. They were responsive and worked proactively to understand our requirements, offering solutions and prompt infrastructure delivery. The way they worked and the help rendered gave me a boost in confidence and faith in HPE.

From Cost Savings to Support, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Delivers

Things have improved vastly for us after using HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. After adopting HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, we are now able to operate optimally and provide quality services for our clients with minimal disruption. Whenever a minor issue arises, we’ll be notified and will receive suggestions promptly to resolve the issue with Level 1 and Level 2 support. This facilitates a smooth process from detecting to resolving an issue, requiring minimal downtime and disruption, contributing to our pool of happy and highly satisfied clients.

In addition, one of the great benefits WIZTECH has gained from using HPE Nimble Storage dHCI was the ease of our management. The dashboard provides a clear overview of the entire infrastructure and operation. Unlike other solutions, there is no steep learning curve with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI – that means I do not need highly specialized engineers to manage the platform. This frees up our workforce and allows me to allocate resources effectively. I do not need to spend substantial resources to resolve issues or maintain our data center like we used to.

Furthermore, our storage efficiency has also increased due to the high deduplication and compression. WIZTECH now uses almost four times less physical storage space than before. It helps us to save tremendously on top of delivering extraordinary performance to our customers.

Investing in the Next Big Thing

SAP software, especially SAP HANA, has strict requirements for its equipment to comply with before running the solution—such as requiring a high compute, memory, and storage performance. With HPE equipment being SAP HANA certified, this is a testament to the quality of their product and enables WIZTECH to provide a new and unique cloud offering for SAP Business One.

Given my pleasant experience of using HPE Nimble, in the spring of 2021 after HPE’s announcement to combine the best of HPE Nimble Storage and HPE Primera into HPE Alletra, I did not hesitate to sign up and purchase it. I was glad to make this decision and was honored to learn that WIZTECH was the first in Singapore to purchase and offer HPE Alletra as a service.

HPE Alletra is engineered to work with the Data Services Cloud Console to deliver a common cloud operational experience across all workload-optimized systems hosted on-premises and in the cloud. The cloud management will allow global companies like WIZTECH to manage its infrastructure across different countries. As the cloud infrastructure landscape continues to change, I trust and believe in HPE Alletra will help us scale and cater to growing demands. 

I sleep better at night as I know I can rely on HPE. To know that our solutions can support and offer a highly stable and reliable infrastructure to the market, I am assured and confident that WIZTECH can grow and deliver a quality and exceptional experience to meet our customers’ needs.